Hot Spots and Cutting Edge Trends in CiteSpace based Research on Social Anxiety among College Students

Background Mental health problems among college students have become increasingly prominent. Social anxiety is one of the prevalent psychological problems among college students. Objective To explore the research hot spots, frontiers and trends on social anxiety among college students, and provide reference for researchers participating in the research of college students' social anxiety in the future. Methods 643 English articles in database of Web of Science (WOS) and 166 Chinese articles in database of China National Knowledge Infrastructure (CNKI) from 2000 to 2021 were analyzed using CiteSpace on August 27, 2021. Results The number of English articles on social anxiety among college students showed an increasing trend from 2000 to 2021. The research hot spots and frontiers of social anxiety among college students were mainly focused on substance abuse, mobile phone and internet addiction, negative evaluation fear, racial differences, psychological intervention and COVID-19 epidemic. The future research trends were mainly focused on the mechanism of substance abuse and mobile phone addiction. Conclusion Chinese scholars can refer to the research hot spots, trends and the differences between domestic and foreign research shown by this visual analysis, and focus on the related problems of substance abuse and mobile internet addiction among college students with social anxiety.