Abstract
Conferences and other kinds of scientific meetings are becoming increasingly important as means of scientific communication, especially in highly dynamic and multidisciplinary fields of knowledge. A “conference approach” has been pursued by collecting and analyzing data about conferences, courses, workshops, and exhibitions in the field of new biotechnology. The data cover the period of 1984–91. The textual conference data were categorized using a content analytic approach and a coding scheme. It encompasses all relevant fields of biotechnology, describing them in five dimensions: fields of knowledge, areas of application, groups of organisms that are of interest at meetings, methods of biotechnological relevance, and contexts of application and further development of biotechnology. In addition, variables describing the social, spatial, and time dimensions of scientific meetings as social gatherings were also taken into consideration. Distributions of and correlations between the categories are used to analyze structures of themes. If one differentiates these thematic structures according to organizing institutions, countries, and time, certain pecularities will be clearly visible.
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References and notes
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The project, data, process of data collection, coding scheme, and results are described in much more detail inB. Martens, T. Saretzki, Conferences and courses on biotechnology. Describing scientific communication by exploratory methods,Scientometrics, 27 (1993) 237–260.
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The intercoder reliability of the codings ranges between 0.78 and 0.80.K. Krippendorff,Content Analysis, Sage, Beverly Hills 1980, discusses difficulties of determining required levels of reliability. In content analytic literature values exceeding 0.7 are mentioned as sufficient:W. Bos, C. Tarnai (Eds),Angewandte Inhaltsanalyse in Empirischer Paedagogik und Psychologie, Waxmann, Muenster 1989.
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In a symmetric plot like Fig. 1 the points of columns and rows are drawn together (in our case: content analytic dimensions and variables). It should be noted that no distances exist between these two groups of points. However, their direction with regard to the principal axes can be compared.M. J. Greenacre,Theory and Applications of Correspondence Analysis, Academic Press, London, 1984.
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Martens, B., Saretzki, T. Quantitative analysis of thematic structures in the field of biotechnology: A study on the basis of conference data. Scientometrics 30, 117–128 (1994). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02017217
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02017217