Abstract :
In a recent paper in this journal, Loet Leydesdorff and Gaston Heimeriks (2001, Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 52, 1262–1294.) argue that biotechnology develops in a self-organizational mode, through interaction between the intellectual structure and the institutional network of the research field. This claim is empirically supported by a multivariate analysis of documents from core biotechnology journals. One unexpected finding in this paper is the relationship between the title words of documents and the region of their origin. This claim requires examination because, as will be shown, it seems to be an artifact of the method used. If this is so, it undermines the authorsʹ theoretical claim that the production of knowledge is a self-organizing process.
