We investigated the scientific attention garnered by iGEM and the Registry of Standard Parts. A data-driven approach was chosen: We extracted data from search results to various queries (such as ("iGEM" OR "International Genetically Engineered Machine") AND ("synthetic biology" OR "genetic engineering")) from various publication search engines. We searched Web of Knowledge, Scopus, PubMed and Google Scholar. Google Scholar was chosen due to the alternatives' various shortcomings.

We conclude with hypotheses to explain the results and discuss their implications for the iGEM competition.

TODO Put findings summary here too.

Data collection Data and where to find it

Why we used Google Scholar

We must admit iGEM is somewhat of a niche topic. WoK, Scopus and PubMed are strictly curated and limited in scope, so they missed many obviously relevant publications. We also found their search options unsuitable: Many of them did not support full text search (they looked at titles, keywords and abstracts only) or boolean operators. These were requirements, for the following reasons: iGEM cannot be expected to always be the main subject of a paper, hence full text search. There are many relevant terms floating about iGEM, hence boolean operators like "OR" to allow treating papers that contain "International Genetically Engineered Machine" or the acronym "iGEM" equally. Google Scholar, however, fulfilled these requirements.

What sort of scope range are we talking about here? Here is an example: PubMed gave so few results (16 for iGEM genetic*) that we quickly discarded it. Manually merging the Web of Knowledge and Scopus results for the query iGEM AND genetic* (discarding obviously irrelevant results) gave 43 results. Then we queried Google Scholar. It gave us 770 for (“synthetic biology” OR "genetic engineering") AND (“iGEM” OR “International Genetically Engineered Machine"). Imagine our expressions.

Of course, Google Scholar too is but a bronze bullet: It brings its own drawbacks. It is engineered to pick up things that only seem like scholarly articles. Like Google's search results in general, the results are not curated by a human. This has been criticised in the literature (Péter J., 2006.). Also we found the occasional hilarious total miss. Google Scholar is also known to somewhat overestimate citation counts (Iselid, L., 2006.). However, we concluded from empirical manual examination of a random sample that the majority of the results are plausible and (most importantly) far greater in scope than searches in curated databases. We only want statistics to identify trends. For this, large and coarce pieces suffice. We discourage using our method for obtaining precise values!

Browse the data

Our tables

...are online in a nifty and very usable Google Docs folder.

An introduction is included in case you get lost or want more information.

On extraction tools

We made extensive use of Harzing Publish or Perish (Harzing, A.W., 2007.) to scrape Google Scholar results. The tool has many limitations. However, it is in our experience the best out there for managing the mess that scientific publication data scraping tends to become!

We did try other things: We quickly found manual methods too slow. Various Firefox browser plugins simply failed outright, were extremely awkward to use or produced clearly erroneous results. The Mac OS program Papers was easy to use and found huge numbers of papers (as it could access many sources), but had unacceptably high rates of error, problems with duplicates and could not export the results into a form we could easily process. Hence Publish or Perish.

Query summary

Here's a quick breakdown of what we queried for on Google Scholar and what sort of data was returned. (The ID matches the name of the data set in our data tables).

Note Searches were capped at a maximum of 1000 results. Hence getting 1000 results for a query implies that more exist! Those first 1000 are only the ones the search engine judged most relevant.

There are many ways you could quantify success of a paper. Here are a few we investigated:

Is our data good?

Yes. Mostly...

We realise it is rather meta-analytical to ask such a question! But given our doubts over accuracy of Google Scholar's data, we considered it a priority to exercise caution with our query results. This paid off: Data sets with IDs 5 and 2 had fatal flaws. They were rejected from further discussion, as discussed soon below. The other data sets were found to be suitable.

Our method to check our data was empirical: Random samplings of each data set were passed under human eyes. For most queries, this observation of random subsets showed acceptably low levels of "background static" (i.e. results that Google Scholar had automatically matched to the query, which were not actually relevant). These would form only a drop of error in the ocean of relevant data.

...but only mostly.

Query 5 (iGEM OR "International Genetically Engineered Machine") was found to have an unacceptably large level of static. The reason was quickly identified: Because the two quoted terms in Query ID 5 ("iGEM", "International Genetically Engineered Machine") were separated by a disjunction (OR), the query would easily match anything that contained even just the acronym "IGEM"! This meant acronyms in economics such as "Inter-temporal General Equilibrium Model (IGEM)" or the British "Institution of Gas Engineers & Managers (IGEM)" and various medical terms and chemical names snuck in. The entire data set with ID 5 was dismissed from further analysis.

The lesson we took from this is not to search for short acronyms by themselves. Query 1 ((“synthetic biology” OR "genetic engineering") AND (“iGEM” OR “International Genetically Engineered Machine")) could be thought of as the "Version Two" of the problematic Query 5. It searches for the same terms, but includes a conjunction (AND) with either synthetic biology or genetic engineering, which bends results toward our iGEM. This tunes static down to an acceptable level.

Query 2 (synthetic biology) had a different problem: It was too big. The query was an attempt to capture stats for the entire field of synthetic biology, so we could statistically determine the relative influence of the iGEM competition. The composer of the query had forgotten the 1000-result cap imposed by Google Scholar. It is impossible to retrieve results beyond this 1k "event horizon". Google does not publish information regarding how the order of results is determined. Hence these first 1000 results (out of what are likely to be 10s or 100s of thousands of papers) are all biased by some unknown force. Were more cited papers favoured? Were papers published more recently favoured? No conclusions can be drawn from a biased and small subset of the full data. We also discounted data set 2 from any further analysis.

To reiterate: Data sets 2 and 5 are not included in any further analysis. We claim to have taken all reasonable steps to minimise error.

Is iGEM getting attention?

What's "attention"? We will operate under the reasonable assumption that getting attention correlates very strongly with being mentioned. Hence the attention that some term is getting is quantifiable simply by searching for that term and summing up result counts.

Here is a chart summarising how many papers mention various terms floating about iGEM over time:

Chart 1: Summary of iGEM-related attention over time

Number of teams Papers mentioning iGEM Papers mentioning parts registry Parts submitted (10s) Papers mentioning specific Registry Parts

Note As the label too states, the Parts submitted are in 10s i.e. units of ten! (The other values are unscaled.) We may do this again further on in the document without repeating this notice, so pay attention!

And the answer is...

Things are looking good for iGEM! Since the first iGEM competition in 2003, ever more teams have taken part each year and more parts have been submitted. These efforts seem to have paid off, as scientific papers mentioning iGEM and the Registry of Standard Parts have been on a consistently proportional rise.

Papers mentioning a specific Registry BioBrick have only begun to appear in recent years, but their numbers show growth. We theorise that this may be due to the Registry's contents only now beginning to reach the critical mass necessary to become useful to researchers in general. The founders' dream (iGEM Foundation, 2012b) of "making genetics modular" is becoming reality.

Where this data comes from

Data about participating teams and number of submitted BioBricks comes from iGEM Foundation (2012a). The other data sets come from the results Google Scholar queries with IDs 1, 3 and 4 (see query summary table above).

Is the relationship between iGEM and the Registry clear?

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  Chart 2: iGEM attention

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  Chart 3: "iGEM and Registry" attention

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  Chart 4: Registry attention

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Expectations

The most important goal of the iGEM competition is to build up well-charactrised BioBrick content in the Registry. We think publications that mention iGEM but not its purpose have likely missed the point rather badly. Hence we expected papers that mention iGEM to almost ubiquitously also mention the Registry. However, as the Registry not only used by iGEM, we expected also to find a large number of papers that mention the Registry without mentioning iGEM.

In other words, we expected:

• a large proportion of papers that mention iGEM and the Registry,
• a large propotion that mention only the Registry and
• only a very small proportion that mention only iGEM.

Yes and No

TODO Continue here

Chart 5: Proportional mentions of iGEM, Registry and Both

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