Variables Linked to Academic Stress Related to the Psychological Well-Being of College Students Inside and Outside the Context of the COVID-19 Pandemic

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

Overall this paper offers an original contribution to the field. Revisions are proposed to ensure the methodological procedure is applied appropriately, findings are organised and summarised succinctly, and implications situated within the wider literature,

Introduction

-        For clarity, it would be helpful to use some shorter sentences. Sentence one and two for example, contain a lot of conceptual information that would be helpful to break down. For example, 1.) the growing student population & 2.) The relationship between psychological wellbeing and academic performance & public health. It would be helpful to separate and make the latter point clearer.

-        Please be mindful of generalisation. There is contrary evidence that extracurricular activities and work can have a positive impact on student wellbeing, rather than necessary causing ‘socio-emotional problems’ (P1, L30).

-        For clarity, I would recommend changing ‘social isolation’ in line 45 on page 1 to the Covid pandemic. There is lots of evidence that there is no ‘before or after social isolation among students’ (P1, 45).

-        It would be helpful to provide more context on which country the evidence you are citing refers to. Covid-19 restrictions and the context for universities vary internationally.

-        Consider revising the structure to be clearer and more succinct. There is unclear movement and repetition of virtual education, the wider pandemic context, and academic stress and mental health that is not always clear for the reader to follow.   

-        The definition and theorisation of academic stress and psychological wellbeing is a strength of the paper. Consider including a brief sentence on the distinction with academic burnout, as this is a term you use in the introduction.

Method

-        Please provide justification of why two databases were used and sufficient to answer the research question.

-        You use the word better frequently (e.g. for a better initial selection: P7, L321). Please justify why these methodological choices are better.  

Results

-        It is unclear what table 4 contributes because it is not the full  list. It would be more helpful to signpost to appendix A.

-        Please remove figure 2 and 3 and report this briefly in the data. There should not be intervals of .5 in figure 3.

-        Isn’t table 5 and figure 4 just a product of your inclusion and selection criteria? Please either remove or provide more justification of what this demonstrates and contributes to the field.  

-        Please could you revisit your codes in table 6 to ensure they are clear. These should be short and stand alone but it is unclear what they refer to.

-        When you cite percentages from multiple studies, (e.g. table 6) could you explain in the analysis of how you have calculated this (e.g. 19% of students).

-        I find your results unclear and overwhelming. Perhaps you could report them using subheadings in the text as well as using tables.

Comments on the Quality of English Language

Use of English vocabulary is almost perfect. English could be a lot clearer with shorter sentences and more succinct writing. 

Author Response

Dear reviewer:

Thank you very much for your time spent reviewing our paper. Please see the attachment. We, the authors, have made the changes suggested by each of the reviewers. In addition, we have included the line numbers where you can see the changes.

Again, our thanks for their comments. They helped us to improve the paper.

Kind regards.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

Thank you for exploring this research area and setting the way for future research. This is an interesting topic and research question.

I think with some clarity in places and work on structure, this would make a nice review.

Overall

I feel a lot of the paper could be written more succinctly. There is an attempt to follow PRISMA guidance, this could be followed more smoothly. Reading other high standard reviews might help here, I recommend the Cochrane library.

Introduction

It would be useful to reference worldwide literature regarding student wellbeing, rather than limiting to Latin America.

I think for clarity the research questions should be reframed to: What is the academic stress-related variables associated with the psychological well-being of university students during and after the context of the COVID-19 pandemic?

As it stands, it reads as if you are doing a before and during covid comparison or maybe even before, during and after.

Materials and Methods

Can you make it clear in the eligibility criteria how you are defining during and after the COVID-19 pandemic? i.e. is this based on years students were recruited, information stated in individual studies etc.

I realise this review does not follow a typical ‘PICOS’ structure but you could use other models like PEOS (participants, exposure, outcome, study design)- this will help structure your whole review in terms of research question, eligibility criteria, search strategy, study characteristics etc.

In the search strategy section, I am confused by the sentence “Likewise, the recommendations of similar variables obtained through publications in Google Scholar were followed.”, do you mean you looked at previous systematic review strategies for inspiration for search terms? I wouldn’t mention google scholar as it sounds like you used that as an information source/database which I don’t think you did?

If you are following PRISMA guidance, you do not need to report number of included studies until the results section (study selection).

It would be great to see more around what previous research or guidance supports your method of synthesising studies. Usually when meta-analysis is not followed, SWiM guidelines are encouraged OR papers that guide a qualitative synthesis: Thomas, J., & Harden, A. (2008). Methods for the thematic synthesis of qualitative research in systematic reviews. BMC medical research methodology, 8, 1-10.

As it stands the ‘synthesis methods’ section is very vague. If someone was to replicate your methods exactly, they wouldn’t understand how you answered your research question.

Results

Table 3 is a nice touch but is not needed.

A word cloud is not an academic style of reporting research.

There’s a lot of interesting information in the results section but as it’s not set up well in the methods section, it all feels like a surprise. I think some work around structure and clarity in the methods would support readability here.

Discussion

Please proofread and remove repetition of information.

Comments on the Quality of English Language

Good

Author Response

Dear reviewer:

Thank you very much for your time spent reviewing our paper. Please see the attachment. We, the authors, have made the changes suggested by each of the reviewers. In addition, we have included the line numbers where you can see the changes.

Again, our thanks for their comments. They helped us to improve the paper.

Kind regards.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 3 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

Thanks for the opportunity to review this paper on an important topic. First, I would like to say you have taken a scholarly and thorough approach to an unwieldy subject and your findings are no doubt of interest to a wide audience in the field. There is extraneous detail in your methods and characteristics of included studies, and then key info is missing in the characteristics section. 
I was very interested in your identified themes and there is much to learn from what you have synthesised.
The flaws in the study are in your definitions of terms and how you have conceptualised academic stress v wellbeing.
Specific points
Page 1 para 1- problems… should be ‘are’ not ‘is’
Page 2- the However at start of para 1 not needed. Excess use of however and starting things with a however is a bug bear of mine, but this one is defo not needed.
Page 2 - this section is repetitive, I would review all this section to be much more succinct- see also your discussion section where the key points here are encapsulated in 2 short paras - could be moved here.
Page 2 - define ‘beyond recognition’ - surely it is recognisable as you are doing so.
Page 3- ‘habits’ not quite the right word- do you mean modes? Approaches?
Page 4 - multiple aims- hard to follow- your true aims are at the end of the page- this needs foregrounding and the rest may not be necessary
Section
Section 1.2 well-being- you give a brief summary of some of the debate re wellbeing but what is required here is your operational definition- how are you defining wellbeing for this paper ? - and why? I also found the discussion on stress a bit confusing- best have clear succinct definitions of both your key terms, and I’m not sure what you define as ‘academic stress’ is simply that.
You use burnout and exhaustion as synonyms for academic stress in your paper searching but I’m not sure these are defined in your discussion earlier.
Similarly your synonyms for wellbeing- wellness, welfare, comfort- are true synonyms for that term, I would be interested to know if any of the synonyms yielded included papers rather than ones with ‘wellbeing’ in the title, I expect not, hence you may have as well not synonymised.
Results
3.1- all the first sentence op to the comma is not necessary.
108 scopes, 110 WoS- so an 0.5% difference- you describe this as a higher percentage of indexing- this is so minimal it’s not worth mentioning.
3.2
Much of this section is not really necessary and could be cut down. I am unsure why you have a table with info on 11 of your papers, rather than all. A more standard, comprehensive table of study characteristics giving for example sample size, country of origin, data collection, data analysis methods would be useful to readers. The table that is included is not of use to readers.
P23 paras 3 and 4 - this succinct summary would be good in the intro rather than the discussion.
Implications - not sure if they flow from your findings. 

Comments on the Quality of English Language

I would encourage you to undertake a proof read and edit of the paper to see if you can present your information more succinctly as there is quite a lot of repetition , particularly in your intro sections. The paper is written with long, multi- clause sentences. This is quite hard to read and has led to some minor grammar errors throughout.

Author Response

Dear reviewer:

Thank you very much for your time spent reviewing our paper. Please see the attachment. We, the authors, have made the changes suggested by each of the reviewers. In addition, we have included the line numbers where you can see the changes.

Again, our thanks for their comments. They helped us to improve the paper.

Kind regards.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Round 2

Reviewer 2 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

Thank you for taking on board reviewer comments. Best of luck with future research.