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. 2023 Sep 15:14:1140298.
doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2023.1140298. eCollection 2023.

Culture and the assumptions about appearance and reality: a scientometric look at a century of research

Alessandro Carollo  1 , Alfonso Maria Stanzione  1 , Seraphina Fong  1 , Giulio Gabrieli  2 , Albert Lee  2 , Gianluca Esposito  1
Affiliations

Culture and the assumptions about appearance and reality: a scientometric look at a century of research

Alessandro Carollo et al. Front Psychol. .

Abstract

Introduction: People represent the world in terms of two constructs: how something appears on the surface (appearance) and what it is underneath that surface (reality). Both constructs are central to various bodies of literature. What has not been done, however, is a systematic look at this collection of literature for overarching themes. Motivated by this research gap, the present scientometric review aimed to identify the common themes that penetrate through a century of scholarly work on appearance and reality. In doing so, this review also sketched a scientometric outline of the international network, pinpointing where the work was carried out.

Methods: With CiteSpace software, we computed an optimized document co-citation analysis with a sample of 4,771 documents (1929-2022), resulting in a network of 1,785 nodes.

Results and discussion: We identified impactful publications, summarized major intellectual movements, and identified five thematic clusters ("Perception of Counseling Services", "Appearance and Reality in Sociocultural Evolution," "Cultural Heritage and Identity," "Media and Culture," and "Cultural Identity"), all with theoretical and pragmatic implications which we discuss. A deeper look at these clusters reveals new empirical questions and promising directions for future research.

Keywords: CiteSpace; appearance; appearance vs. reality; document co-citation; reality; scientometric; systematic review.

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Conflict of interest statement

The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

Figures

FIGURE 1
FIGURE 1
Study flow diagram. The sample of publications were collected from Scopus using the keywords “TITLE-ABS-KEY (cultur* OR ‘cultur* think*’ AND (*appear* OR *real*) AND assumpt* AND (LIMIT-TO (LANGUAGE, ‘English’)).” Data were collected on 30 January 2023.
FIGURE 2
FIGURE 2
Network of publications generated through the document co-citation analysis (DCA). The 14 major clusters of the network are highlighted by using different colors.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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