The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) is an emerging epidemic caused by severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2; Wang D. et al., 2020; Hu et al., 2021). Since 2019, the rapidly spreading COVID-19 pandemic has caused a global health threat (Fang et al., 2022). It is important to note that the COVID-19 pandemic is not only taking a toll on people’s physical health, but also has a negative impact on people’s mental health (Zhang and Chen, 2021; Pappa et al., 2022; Zhang et al., 2022).

As a vulnerable group, students are relatively more prone to negative psychological symptoms (Cao et al., 2020; Copeland et al., 2021). Numerous studies have shown that during the COVID-19 pandemic, students’ mental health has been severely challenged, regardless of their academic stage. A cross-sectional study using data from the Mental Health Survey of School-aged Children and Adolescents in Guangdong Province, China, showed that the prevalence of self-reported psychological distress among students was relatively high during the COVID-19 pandemic (Qin et al., 2021). A large-scale survey of 746,217 college students revealed that acute stress, anxiety, and depressive symptoms are prevalent during the COVID-19 pandemic, and that multiple epidemiological and psychosocial factors are associated with an increased risk of mental health problems (Ma et al., 2020). The mental health of master’s, doctoral and postdoctoral researchers has also been severely negatively impacted by the pandemic (Salim, 2021). This study aims to explore mental health-related conditions of students during the COVID-19 outbreak. We hypothesize that students’ mental health has been widely challenged during the COVID-19 pandemic and needs more care and support.

Over the past 2 years, a raft of research has been published on student mental health during the COVID-19 pandemic. However, there is no literature that systematically evaluates the relevant published literature. Bibliometrics uses mathematical and statistical methods to quantitatively analyze a large amount of literature in a specific research field, exploring research aspects and research trends in that field (Contreras-Barraza et al., 2021; Shen et al., 2022). Many researchers have used bibliometrics to evaluate their fields of study (Contreras-Barraza et al., 2021; Darroudi et al., 2021; Peng et al., 2022). However, no specific bibliometric studies have been conducted to date on the knowledge graph of student mental health during the COVID-19 pandemic. We have used bibliometrics to understand what is the current state of research work in this field, and question what are the research priorities and new trends? And further find out new problems that should addressed and possible directions to solve the problem. Therefore, we used R software, Scimago software, and citespace software to evaluate the literature on psychological stress of students during the COVID-19 period up to June 4, 2022 by bibliometric method, and generated knowledge maps. The results of these analyses can describe the current state of the field and identify new research directions.

Overall, this paper aims to investigate the output of international scientific publications on student mental health during the COVID-19 pandemic from 2020 to 2022 through a bibliometric analysis, and to explore research trends and hotspots in the field. We found that China and the United States lead in the quantity and quality of publications in this field. Importantly, 16 journals are considered core journals in the field according to Bradford’s Law. In addition, the co-cited references indicated that the main psychological problems of students under the epidemic were closely related to anxiety, poor sleep and financial difficulties. Their behavior may also be affected, such as increased internet usage and alcohol consumption.

In 2020, with the rapid spread of the COVID-19 pandemic, more and more countries have entered partial or nationwide lockdowns (To et al., 2021). Under this circumstance, the mental health of students during the COVID-19 pandemic received greater attention, and a total of 439 relevant publications were published. Between 2021 and 2022, the number of publications in this field increased dramatically. The cumulative number of related articles published in 2021 was 2,202, and in 2022, the number has risen to 2,734. This dramatic increase may be related to the growing physical, psychological, and social challenges that students faced during the pandemic. In terms of the number of relevant publications, the United States and China have the most publications in this field; China and Canada have the highest average citations; the United States and China have the highest H-index. From this perspective, China and the United States are leading the way in this research area. In addition, country/regional cooperation analysis also indicates that China and the United States have established close cooperation in this field. In the institutional collaboration analysis, the University of Toronto and Sichuan University have the most publications. In addition, Beijing Normal University, Peking University, and Harvard Medical School have the most cooperation occurrences, which shows that they are very active in inter-institutional collaborations in this field.

In the analysis of co-cited authors, Wang CY, Cao WJ, Brooks SK, Spitzer RL, Kroenke K, Son C, Cohen S, Lai JB, Xiong JQ and Holmes EA contributed the top 10 co-citations in turn. These researchers have made considerable contributions in this field.

According to the major clusters of co-cited references, we found that the hotspots of related research mainly focus on emotional status (mood state, anxiety level, COVID-19 anxiety), living habits (physical activity, alcohol consumption), learning status (school closure, online learning, online self-directed learning ability), sleep status (poor sleep quality, sleep disturbance), economic pressure (financial difficulties), and medical students (medical student, healthcare worker).

In Table 3, the most co-cited reference is “The psychological impact of the COVID-19 epidemic on college students in China” published by Cao WJ in 2020, and the co-citation count is 547. They conducted a sample analysis of college students at Changzhi Medical College and found that economic impact, daily life impact, and delay in academic activities were positively correlated with anxiety symptoms, while social support was negatively correlated with anxiety levels (Cao et al., 2020). At the same time, they made a recommendation for monitoring the mental health of college students during the COVID-19 pandemic. The second most co-cited reference was the review “The psychological impact of quarantine and how to reduce it: rapid review of the evidence.” Its authors, Brooks SK et al. published it in The Lancet in 2020. They examined the psychological effects of quarantine using three electronic databases. They examined the psychological effects of isolation using three electronic databases, most of which reported negative psychological effects (Brooks et al., 2020). Following these two papers is the article “Immediate Psychological Responses and Associated Factors during the Initial Stage of the 2019 Coronavirus Disease (COVID-19) Epidemic among the General Population in China” by Wang et al. Their findings suggest that females, students and people with specific physical symptoms are more likely to be associated with greater psychological impact and higher levels of stress, anxiety and depression (Wang C. et al., 2020). It is worth mentioning that the three authors, Cao WJ, Brooks SK and Wang CY, are also among the top three authors in the co-citation analysis of authors.

Research on student mental health during the COVID-19 pandemic has gained welcome interest from many journal editors. Among them, the 10 journals in Table 4 contributed the most. The top journals by number of publications are INT J ENV RES PUB HE, FRONT PSYCHOL, and FRONT PSYCHIATRY.

We performed keyword analysis and burst keyword analysis using CiteSpace. In the Keyword Contribution Graph, many keywords have made a large contribution, which shows that the research focus in this field is very diverse. In burst keyword analysis, the top 10 burst keywords in Figure 6 all appeared in 2021, and have maintained a high research interest in 2022. The keywords with the highest burst strength are internet addiction and self-esteem. Through a latent class analysis of Chinese schoolchildren, I-Hua Chen et al. found that during the recovery period of the COVID-19 outbreak, the two groups with a higher level of problematic internet use (PIU) had significantly higher levels of fear of COVID-19 than the one with a lower level (Chen et al., 2021). In addition, a study of residential college students during the COVID-19 lockdown found that the prevalence of PIU was high among residential college students during the COVID-19 lockdown, suggesting that the lockdown policy inevitably had an impact on their social lives. During such stressful events, they are vulnerable to PIU (Xia et al., 2021). Not only in China, many countries have reported the problem of internet addiction among students during the COVID-19 pandemic (Ismail et al., 2021; Kim et al., 2021; Shehata and Abdeldaim, 2021). This reminds us that we should pay attention to students’ Internet addiction during the COVID-19 pandemic. Numerous studies have shown that the negative impact of lockdowns caused by the COVID-19 pandemic on students with low self-esteem is significant. This means that schools and society should provide more support and attention to students with low self-esteem (Testoni et al., 2021; Vall-Roqué et al., 2021).

In addition to the research hotspots in this field, some neglected issues also need to be highlighted. First, suicide is the most serious consequence of negative mental health, but it has not been a research focus. Suicide and self-harm as a result of the direct and indirect effects of the COVID-19 pandemic is a major public health problem, and the social, psychological, and economic consequences of COVID-19 have the potential to impact global suicide rates (Farooq et al., 2021). The suicide rate of students has always been a serious problem, and the negative psychological state, financial burden and low self-esteem of students can lead to the increase of suicide rate (Toprak et al., 2011; Zhang et al., 2017; Duffy et al., 2019; Otsuka and Anamizu, 2019). Although there are relevant studies on the relationship between COVID-19 and student suicide rates and tendencies, this research direction should receive more attention (Hou et al., 2020; Fuse-Nagase et al., 2021; Marutani et al., 2021). Also, it is important to note that since suicides may be reported as unexpected events in statistics, this phenomenon may be underestimated (Pompili et al., 2012). Additionally, in addition to alcohol and Internet addiction, students’ marijuana, tobacco, and drug abuse issues during COVID-19 also require attention (Chaffee et al., 2021; Farhoudian et al., 2021).

From the results of this study, we found that the sources and influencing factors of students’ mental health problems during COVID-19 are extremely complex, which means that a single-approach solution may not be satisfactory. We need multidisciplinary support and multi-institutional collaboration. Such as the multidisciplinary consortium established by Odone et al. with expertise in the fields of economics, social sciences, epidemiology, public health and clinical medicine (Odone et al., 2020). Multidisciplinary competencies along with appropriate funding and access to rich data sources will go a long way toward achieving this goal. A holistic view of the physical, psychological, family and society is crucial to the search for solutions.

In addition, based on our results, it is also important to focus on specific groups of students, including students with addictive habits, students suffering from illness, and students with financial difficulties. It is reasonable to assume that the COVID-19 pandemic exacerbated the plight of these students and significantly damage their mental health. In terms of addictive behaviors, numerous articles have demonstrated the strong relationship between social media addiction, alcohol addiction, drug addiction, smartphone addiction, and other addictive behaviors with COVID-19 and mental health (Sujarwoto et al., 2021; Hu et al., 2022; Lardier et al., 2022; Yehudai et al., 2022). In 2020, a study focusing on children with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) during the COVID-19 pandemic demonstrated that the COVID-19 pandemic further exacerbated these children’s mental health and worsened their behavioral problems (Zhang et al., 2020). There are not many similar studies, but research into the psychological profile of students with disease burden may be a future research trend in this field. There have been many reports on the financial stress of students (Jones et al., 2021; Myhr et al., 2021). However, due to the various factors that cause personal economic stress, such as family, society, region, economy, etc., this direction is still worthy of further research.

Our study has two major limitations. First, we only searched literature data on WoSCC and included only English literature, which may lead to selection bias. Second, authors with the same name and the diversity of keyword expressions can lead to bias.

Since the COVID-19 pandemic, the number of publications related to student mental health has increased dramatically. China and the United States lead in the quantity and quality of publications in this field. This article is the first bibliometric analysis based on the mental health of students during COVID-19 to study the research trends and hot spots. From the detected clusters of citations, students may continue to face difficulties with financial burden, anxiety and poor sleep. Student mental health may be influenced by other factors such as internet and alcohol dependence, which requires further exploration. With the assistance of information visualization, we identified the research hotspots in this field continue to revolve around emotional anxiety and unhealthy behaviors. Further study is needed to investigate the relationship of mental issue and various stressors and the interventions that effectively regulate psychological stress.

The original contributions presented in the study are included in the article/Supplementary material, further inquiries can be directed to the corresponding authors.

QZ and MZ designed this study. QZ, MZ, YY, and QC reviewed and revised the manuscript. QC drafted the original manuscript. YY collected data, performed preliminary data analysis, and completed figures and tables. All authors approved the final manuscript submission and agreed to be responsible for all aspects of the work.

This study was supported by grants from the National Natural Science Foundation of China (81700658 and 82270795) and the Hunan Provincial Natural Science Foundation (2020JJ3058 and 2020JJ4864).

The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

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