Bibliometric analysis of studies on mental health in higher education from 1960 to 2024

The issue of mental health has attracted interest not only in the field of health but also in many sectors from education to industry. Especially the fact that higher education is the intersection of many fields makes mental health in higher education worthy of research. In this respect, the research aims to conduct a bibliometric analysis of studies investigating mental health in higher education institutions. Almost 30 thousand studies published between 1960 and 2024 in Scopus database were reviewed. In the analysis of document, descriptive analysis, citation analysis, co-citation analysis, and keyword analyses were conducted. After reviewing and analysis, four significant results emerged. First of all, the number of studies has increased dramatically in the recent years. Secondly, most of the influential documents were related to Covid-19 and were published in public health journals. Thirdly, the intellectual structure of the knowledge base on mental health in higher education institutions consisted of assessment of mental health, mental health policy, mental wellbeing and health education, public mental health, and mental health interventions. The last result was the fact that the topical foci of the documents presented a coherent perspective with an intellectual structure and showed the dominance of higher education context in the recent years in the corpus of mental health. It was concluded that the study broadens our understanding of the structure and processes of mental health in higher education by bringing a holistic perspective on mental health.