Tracking the emergence of synthetic biology

Abstract

Synthetic biology is an emerging domain that combines biological and engineering concepts and which has seen rapid growth in research, innovation, and policy interest in recent years. This paper contributes to efforts to delineate this emerging domain by presenting a newly constructed bibliometric definition of synthetic biology. Our approach is dimensioned from a core set of papers in synthetic biology, using procedures to obtain benchmark synthetic biology publication records, extract keywords from these benchmark records, and refine the keywords, supplemented with articles published in dedicated synthetic biology journals. We compare our search strategy with other recent bibliometric approaches to define synthetic biology, using a common source of publication data for the period from 2000 to 2015. The paper details the rapid growth and international spread of research in synthetic biology in recent years, demonstrates that diverse research disciplines are contributing to the multidisciplinary development of synthetic biology research, and visualizes this by profiling synthetic biology research on the map of science. We further show the roles of a relatively concentrated set of research sponsors in funding the growth and trajectories of synthetic biology. In addition to discussing these analyses, the paper notes limitations and suggests lines for further work.

The collaborative structure of synthetic biology ethics

“…wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/pra2 et al, 2017), and we used Shapira et al's (2017Shapira et al's ( , p. 1450 proposed query-which we verified with practicing synthetic biologists-to generate the dataset used in the proceeding analyses. We retained only those records mentioning ethics, safety, dilemma, or security.…”

Research on surgical treatment for non-small cell lung cancer from 2009 to 2018: a bibliometric analysis

“…Moreover, Cite Space IV softwarewas used to perform the visualization maps of the overlay journal of the research, and we presented the countries/ regions and burst keywords for the time of the retrieved articles. [10][11] In addition, VOS viewer (Van Eck & Waltman, Leiden University, The Netherlands) was used to analyze the co-cited authors, keywords, and organizations associated with the research contents. We also examined the association networks associated with surgical treatment of NSCLC from 2009 to 2018.…”

More from less – bottom-up reconstitution of cell biology

“…The field of synthetic biology has gained considerable traction over the last years (Shapira et al, 2017). Recent reviews have been devoted to laying out the main goal of bottom-up synthetic biology: recreating life in its simplest form (Göpfrich et al, 2018;Schwille et al, 2018).…”