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

Abstract

AbstractThe analysis of scientific communities and collectives are central to STS and sociological studies of science. However, the current emergence of techno-scientific communities, such as synthetic biology, raises the question as to whether novel identities, but also novel ways of community building have developed. In this respect, the emergence of a new publication regime, the ubiquity of citations as a means of governing attention and visibility, and the establishment of multidisciplinary audiences might have changed the ways of scholarly field formation. In this article I propose that formats of scholarly writing have acquired new functions in this process, changing modes of presenting and legitimating novel scientific communities. Hence, I put forward the idea that the evolution of a specific publication format which I term here as `techno-scientific review article’ and the ways of narrating communities are closely intertwined. To elaborate my argument, I draw on linguistic genre analysis of science. I found that review papers in synthetic biology are important for the field: Equipped with specific textual qualities they become central sites for articulating past and the futures of the field.