The Self-Organization of the European Information Society: The case of "biotechnology"

Leydesdorff, Loet and Heimeriks, Gaston (2001) The Self-Organization of the European Information Society: The case of "biotechnology". Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology 52(14):pp. 1262-1274.

Abstract

Fields of techno-science like biotechnology develop in a network mode: disciplinary insights from different backgrounds are recombined and university-industry relations are continuously reshaped. The ongoing process of integration at the European level generates an additional network of transnational collaborations. Using the title words of scientific publications in five core journals of biotechnology, multi-variate analysis enables us to distinguish between the intellectual organization of the publications in terms of title words (variables) and the institutional structure in terms of addresses of documents (cases). The interaction among the networks in the case of biotechnology documents with European addresses is compared with the document sets with American and Japanese addresses. A complex network system of innovations is sensitive to policy interventions in ways that differ from national systems of innovation.