The Self-Organization of the European Information Society: The Case of ?Biotechnology?
Journal of the American Society for Information Science & Technology, (2001)undefined
Journal of the American Society for Information Science & Technology.Abstract
Fields of technoscience such as biotechnology develop in a network mode, i.e., disciplinary insights from different backgrounds are recombined as competing innovation systems 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, performs multivariate analysis to distinguish between the intellectual organization of the publications in terms of title words and the institutional network in terms of addresses of documents. Compares the interaction among the representation of intellectual space in terms of words and co-words and the potentially European network system with the document sets with American and Japanese addresses. Notes that the European system can also be decomposed in terms of the contributions of member states. Finds that whereas a European vocabulary can be made visible at the global level, this communality disappears by this decomposition. Concludes that the network effect at the European level can be considered more institutional than cognitive.
Fields of technoscience such as biotechnology develop in a network mode, i.e., disciplinary insights from different backgrounds are recombined as competing innovation systems 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, performs multivariate analysis to distinguish between the intellectual organization of the publications in terms of title words and the institutional network in terms of addresses of documents. Compares the interaction among the representation of intellectual space in terms of words and co-words and the potentially European network system with the document sets with American and Japanese addresses. Notes that the European system can also be decomposed in terms of the contributions of member states. Finds that whereas a European vocabulary can be made visible at the global level, this communality disappears by this decomposition. Concludes that the network effect at the European level can be considered more institutional than cognitive.