Factors associated with academic well-being and satisfaction with studies among university students: A systematic review

Abstract

Academic well-being and satisfaction with studies in higher education constitute a multidimensional phenomenon linked to individual, institutional, and contextual factors. Their analysis gains relevance in light of university massification, the growing burden of emotional disorders, and methodological diversity, which makes systematic reviews necessary to generate comparative and transferable evidence. In this sense, the central objective of this article is to analyze recent scientific evidence on the factors associated with academic well-being and satisfaction with studies among university students through a systematic review of the literature published over the last five years. The research employed a qualitative approach, incorporating a systematic literature review (2020–2025) and complemented by a bibliometric analysis. Five databases were consulted, and the PRISMA model was applied, resulting in 68 articles being selected. Excel, VOSviewer, Atlas. ti, Zotero, and Copilot were employed to ensure organization, relational analysis, categorization, and methodological rigor. The results show sustained production between 2020 and 2025, with a predominance of observational studies and scarce experimental research. Publications are dispersed across multiple journals, reflecting interdisciplinarity and fragmented coauthorship networks. The findings identify individual, institutional, and contextual factors shaping differentiated trajectories, revealing a complex, dynamic, and bidirectional relationship between academic well-being and satisfaction. The review indicates that academic well-being and satisfaction are interdependent processes conditioned by psychological, institutional, and contextual factors. Their understanding requires frameworks such as self-determination theory, person–environment fit, and the ecological model. Observational studies predominate, editorial dispersion persists, and the field needs more robust designs and greater theoretical integration in the future.