Abstract
Systems biology is a discipline that studies biological systems from a holistic and interdisciplinary perspective. It brings together biologists, mathematicians, computer scientists, physicists, and engineers, so it has both biology-oriented components and systems-oriented components. We applied several computational tools to analyze the bibliographic information of published articles in systems biology to answer the question: Did the research topics of systems biology become more biology-oriented or more systems-oriented from 1992 to 2013? We analyzed the metadata of 9923 articles on systems biology from the Web of Science database. We identified the most highly cited 330 references using computational tools and through close reading we divided them into nine categories of research types in systems biology. Interestingly, we found that articles in one category, namely, systems biology’s applications in medical research, increased tremendously. This finding was corroborated by computational analysis of the abstracts, which also suggested that the percentages of topics on vaccines, diseases, drugs and cancers increased over time. In addition, we analyzed the institutional backgrounds of the corresponding authors of those 9923 articles and identified the most highly cited 330 authors over time. We found that before the mid-1990s, systems-oriented scientists had made the most referenced contributions. However, in recent years, researchers from biology-oriented institutions not only represented a huge percentage of the total number of researchers, but also had made the most referenced contributions. Notably, interdisciplinary institutions only produced a small percentage of researchers, but had made disproportionate contributions to this field.
Highlights
Systems biology has emerged over the past two decades, aiming to examine organisms from a systematic and holistic perspective
Some scholars argue that systems biology’s early roots emerged in the middle half of the twentieth century such as theories about cybernetics proposed by Norbert Wiener in 1948, Denis Noble’s heart model in 1960, and Ludwig von Bertalanffy’s General Systems Theory [10,11,12]. We argue that these early work failed to establish systems biology as a legitimate discipline so we did not choose to an older time
The trends of topics based on topic modeling suggested that more recently a higher percentage of articles includes topics about immune system and vaccines, diseases, drugs and cancer
Summary
Systems biology has emerged over the past two decades, aiming to examine organisms from a systematic and holistic perspective. Systems biologists have made many attempts to improve on the methodology such as developing various algorithms for dealing with large datasets and formalisms that model a specific network including gene regulatory networks, signal transduction networks, and metabolic networks [1]. Some scholars argue that systems biology’s early roots emerged in the middle half of the twentieth century such as theories about cybernetics proposed by Norbert Wiener in 1948, Denis Noble’s heart model in 1960, and Ludwig von Bertalanffy’s General Systems Theory [10,11,12] We argue that these early work failed to establish systems biology as a legitimate discipline so we did not choose to an older time. Our research is interesting to them because this study showcases the knowledge about and tools to investigate the institutional backgrounds of the practitioners in systems biology
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Free) 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a call
