Synthetic Biology Discourse on Twitter

Synthetic biology is a multifaceted field that spans disciplines, sectors, and industries, but, despite this fact, much bibliometric knowledge about synthetic biology comes from a focus on scholarly literature. This paper investigates discourse about synthetic biology on Twitter because it is a popular platform for synthetic biology stakeholders and because it captures a diverse range of topics surrounding synthetic biology. Using hierarchical stochastic blockmodels and community detection, we investigate the range of synthetic biology topics discussed on Twitter and the general structure of the discourse. Major findings include that discussion of synthetic biology on Twitter largely focuses on non-scholarly topics, that there is a wide range of topics discussed, and that the hashtags used to organize synthetic biology Twitter discourse form a sparse network of many disconnected clusters. We conclude with a discussion of the implications of these findings for the bibliometric literature on synthetic biology and note future work to be undertaken as a result of this inquiry.