Synthetic biology: From a word to a world

Abstract

Synthetic biology is one of the battlefields where the main countries fight for the supremacy in science. The word synthetic biology hides a big world, ready to be explored by interdisciplinary research collaborations. The purpose of this investigation is to reveal the what, where, when of the current situation in this emerging field. A keyword search string for the field was constructed and applied in the Web of Science and in the Derwent Innovations Index. In particular, we calculated year based h-type indices for high-frequent keywords.