Psychological adjustment under dual pressures: a bibliometric analysis of the impact of academic stress and employment anxiety on college students’ mental health

Mental health of College students has long been a critical research topic in higher education and psychological research. Academic pressure and employment anxiety are the primary stressors that affect their psychological adaptation. To overcome the lack of objectivity and systematicity in existing literature reviews, this study takes the core databases of CNKI and Web of Science as data sources. It adopts CiteSpace, VOSviewer and other analytical tools to conduct bibliometric analysis and knowledge graph visualization. This research intends to map the evolutionary trajectory, academic collaboration landscape and intellectual structure of this research field, and further explore the value of bibliometric methods in supporting the localized revision of stress theories. The findings reveal notable disparities between domestic research trajectories and those of Chinese scholars’ English-language publications. Domestic studies have formed a dual-dominant framework revolving around academy and employment, whereas international scholarship primarily focuses on general psychological mechanisms. Academic collaboration networks across the field remain loosely connected. The Cognitive Appraisal Theory of Stress serves as the mainstream theoretical foundation. Additionally, research paradigms are gradually shifting toward positive psychology, and the prominent emergence of psychological resilience provides quantitative evidence for theoretical revision. This study establishes a localized theoretical model labeled dual stress–cognitive appraisal–resilience buffering, which achieves dynamic optimization and localized adaptation of classical stress theories. From a macro bibliometric perspective, this paper remedies the shortcomings of traditional reviews, and provides scientific implications for addressing dual stress at the source and implementing targeted mental health interventions for College students.