QUANTITATIVE-ANALYSIS OF THEMATIC STRUCTURES IN THE FIELD OF BIOTECHNOLOGY - A STUDY ON THE BASIS OF CONFERENCE DATA

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.