The generativity and attractiveness of social representations theory from multiple paradigmatic approaches in various thematic domains: An empirical meta-theoretical analysis on big-data sources from the specialised repository "SoReCom 'A.S. de Rosa' @-library"

This paper is a systematic meta-theoretical literature review of publications inspired by the theory of social representations from diverse paradigmatic approaches in various thematic domains. Descriptive exploratory analysis of 9660 contributions filed in the specialised inventory "SoReCom 'A.S.de Rosa' @-library" (mainly articles in scientific journals, but also conference presentations, book chapters, theses and books) including the geo-mapping of the results with Tableau software is enriched by further empirical insight from textual data mining of abstracts and keywords using IRAMUTEQ software to perform descending hierarchical cluster analysis. As a result, four specific clusters emerge, labelled as follows: "Topics, Targets, Thematic Areas", "Constructs", "Theories, Disciplines, Authors, Epistemologies", and "Method Techniques, Data Collection, Data Analysis". The empirical review of each cluster provides a useful insight about the generativity and the attractiveness of Social Representations theory from multiple paradigmatic approaches along different decades and across various geo-cultural contexts-continents, showing the main trends in diverse thematic domains. The article allows researchers working on the theory of social representation to generate a "mental map" of the theory and highlights its many contributions around the world.