The self-organization of the European Information Society: The case of “biotechnology”

Fields of technoscience like biotechnology develop in a network mode: 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, multivariate analysis is used to distinguish between the intellectual organization of the publications in terms of title words and the institutional network in terms of addresses of documents. The interaction among the representation of intellectual space in terms of words and co-words, and the potentially European network system is compared with the document sets with American and Japanese addresses. The European system can also be decomposed in terms of the contributions of member states. Whereas a European vocabulary can be made visible at the global level, this communality disappears by this decomposition. The network effect at the European level can be considered as institutional more than cognitive.