Conferences and courses on biotechnology. Describing scientific communication by exploratory methods

Abstract

The importance of conferences, courses, workshops, and other kinds of scientific meetings is still growing, especially in highly dynamic or multidisciplinary fields of knowledge. Since these meetings are usually the first occasion of communicating scientific findings, it seems worthwhile to use data on conferences in order to depict trends in science and technology, at an early point of time. Nevertheless, only a few studies on these types of scientific and technological communication were undertaken until now. One prominent example for the relevance of conferences and for the necessity of some monitoring is the field of the “new” biotechnology. We followed a “conference approach” by using data on 4,674 meetings that took place in the time span 1984–90. Content analytic methods (a coding scheme of 70 categories) seemed to be appropriate, according to the textual type of data (information about the meetings, mostly programs). Distributions of categories show specific features and multiple correspondence analyses of concatenated Burt matrices of the categories, differentiated to the years provide a broad overview of biotechnological conferences and other types of meetings in the eighties. Connections between fields of knowledge and applications or certain characteristics of the meetings can be summarized in five clusters of features which are relatively stable within the time frame of investigation.