While numerous qualitative social scientific analyses of (environmental) epigenetics have been published, we still lack a macro-level, quantitative assessment of the field of epigenetics as a whole. This article is aimed at filling this gap. Mobilizing an extended version of the Web of Science, we constituted a corpus of 199,484 documents (articles, reviews, editorial material, etc.) published between 1991 and 2017 and performed several scientometric analyses to map out the development and structure of the epigenetics field. Three main results were drawn from these investigations. First, contradicting the hope expressed by some social scientists that their disciplines will find solace in epigenetics’ social biology, it is striking that the scientists, journals and institutions that drive most of the research in the field are overall little concerned with social and environmental dimensions of gene expression. Second, and confirming existing qualitative analyses, we find that epigenetics is constituted by diverse networks of scholars, institutions and research specialties that enjoy relative autonomy from each other and approach epigenetics through different thematic interests, from cognitive functions to cancer, to DNA methylation in plants and molecular biology. Third, findings obtained from the bibliographic coupling showed that these different networks became more and more autonomous over the last decade, which suggests that we are currently witnessing the constitution of a scientific archipelago akin to that of behavior genetics (Panofsky, 2014: 33) rather than to a discipline per se. At the same time, this differentiation was less pronounced conceptually speaking, as we also observed a clear standardization of the keywords used in epigenetics articles between 1991 and 2017, with DNA methylation and RNAs serving as rallying signs for different communities of researchers.

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Mobilizing scientometric analyses and semi-structured interviews, this article investigates the emergence of ‘genopolitics’ and the scientific and academic stakes surrounding the study of genetic factors of political behavior. While the first paper on genopolitics was published in 2005, it was not until 2012 that we could observe the stabilization of this scientific movement. Though genopolitics is a relatively homogenous movement, it is nonetheless affected by internal struggles relating to the construction of a scientific programme that would be regarded as legitimate by all of its members, as well as by political scientists and the rest of the scientific field as a whole. Beyond these disagreements concerning the best appellation for, and main goal of, their programme, genopoliticians advocate for the emergence of a new paradigm in political science that would resolve the anomalies observed within empirical research resorting to the dominant rational choice and socio-psychological theories. Paradoxically, one consequence of this attempt at advancing political science is to threaten its epistemological independence, as illustrated by the use of methodological standards borrowed from behavior genetics. At the individual level, genopolitics provides an opportunity for political scientists to contribute to a controversial, but innovative area of research, and thus to ameliorate their position within the scientific field.