**3. Results**

The first articles on academic performance were published in 1952, so therefore it was decided that the selected time interval would be from 1952 to 2019. 16,157 publications and 35,213 citations inside the WOS were found. Out of all the publications, 77.62% were articles, 13.5% proceedings papers, 3.75% reviews, 2.16% meeting abstracts, 1.61% book chapters and the remaining 1.01% was comprised of editorial materials, letters, notes, book reviews, corrections, books, data papers, news items, reprints, amendments, additions and retracted publications.

The number of publications on this topic has increased significantly since 2015 (1952–2014: 46.77% of publications; 2015–2019: 53.23% of publications). 2018 was the year with the highest number of publications, with 1889 publications and 120 citations on the network (Figure 1).

Figure 2 shows the citation network and Table 1 all the details of the 20 most-cited publications. The first was an article by Richardson et al. [21], which was published in 2012 and boasted a citation index of 352. This work was a systematic review and meta-analysis of the years between 1997 and 2010 that analyzed 7167 articles on different demographic and psychosocial factors that influence academic performance in university students.



**Figure 2.** Citation Network of the 20 most cited publications on academic performance.

Out of the 20 most-cited articles, 11 dealt with the psychological factors that affect academic performance [21–27,31,32,36,37]. Two of the articles discussed how demographic and cognitive factors and personality can predict future academic performance [30,40]. Three articles addressed the benefits that healthy lifestyles have on academic performance [33,34,39]. The impact of sleep on academic performance was considered in three of the articles [29,35,38] and the final article focused on how the use of digital devices and social media affects academic performance [28].
