School engagement as a mediator in students’ social relationships and academic performance: a survey based on CiteSpace

Purpose: In studies related to education, sociology and economics, the relationship between students’ social relationships and their academic performance is one of the most important research topics; a large number of research studies have focused on it. This study aims to analyze the previous studies about social interaction and academic performance and attempts to reveal the underlying mechanism. Design/methodology/approach: This study uses CiteSpace to analyze 1,843 articles on social relationships and academic performance from 2001 to 2019. According to the co-cited literature network results in CiteSpace, this study proposes an adapted conceptual framework of the relationship between social relationships and academic performance. This paper further examines more studies about the two most-cited articles in the co-cited literature network for better understanding. Findings: From the results of the co-cited literature network, this study determines that school engagement is an important mediator between social relationships and academic performance. This paper further examines studies on school engagement and determine that, along with the self-determination theory, school engagement is influenced by multiple components of self-determination theory: autonomy, competence and relatedness. Originality/value: According to the visual result in CiteSpace, this study examines a research trend in which researchers scholars start to conduct micro and detailed empirical research on the impact of the specific social networks on academic performance because of the progress of information technology. Therefore, based on the previous literature that we have analyzed, this study predicts that the trend of using information technology, such as data mining or data analysis, in this academic field will become a mainstream practice in the future. © 2020, Yin Li, Leiju Qiu and Baowen Sun.