What Synthetic Biology Aims At: Review Articles as Sites for Constructing and Narrating an Emerging Field

Abstract

The analysis of scientific communities and collectives are central to STS and the sociology of science. Reviewing practices, that is, practices of ordering, defining or delineating scientific fields can be understood as an often neglected, yet prevailing textual practice of community building, particularly in novel and emerging research fields, such as synthetic biology. In this article, I aim to explore the structure and content of review articles as a dedicated scholarly genre in synthetic biology, focusing on the period between 2002 and 2012. Based on a theoretical framework combining approaches from genre analysis and the sociology of translation, I explore the different types of review articles one finds in the field, how these review articles deal with or order research in the field, and how they present the field as a whole. I found that modes of legitimation and presentation have changed during the studied period. While in the beginning, review articles referred to the histories of other fields and disciplines, in the more recent years I found a more narrative mode of legitimation whereby synthetic biology is presented as an engineering field with its own history. I argue that such narrations can be understood as a specific way of community building in science.