Mapping the emergence and development of translational cancer research
Introduction
The present paper introduces a new method of mapping cancer research and contributes new evidence to the ongoing discussion of two complementary issues:
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The first concerns the policy debate about the relationships between different forms of cancer research. Fueled by the perception that medical problems can be solved through biological innovation, public and private sponsors of research have designed translational research programs whose goal is to accelerate the exchange of concepts and techniques between fundamental biology and medical practice. Debates over the modalities of translational research have focused on whether it follows a unidirectional flow of information from the research laboratory to the patient, or whether there is in fact, as most authors claim, a two-way traffic between basic research and the clinic. According to Coleman and Harris, (p. 132)1 for instance, the “bridge must be crossed in both directions, bringing concepts from the laboratory into the clinic and taking observations from the clinic to the laboratory”. Description of the two-way traffic varies. Alternative representations describe translational research as a bridge connecting two different worlds “that only occasionally meet in an uneasy partnership” (p. 4211),2 or as an emerging interface between the laboratory and the clinic (p. 43),3 that should become a distinctive sphere of activity in its own right. Discussions of translational research frequently broach wider policy concerns including the now decade-long “crisis” in clinical research4, 5 and the ensuing need to reinforce this distinctive form of research by establishing dedicated institutions and career patterns.6
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Despite its evident policy implications, the second issue is primarily historical and epistemological and concerns the emergence in the late 20th-century of a distinctively biomedical form of cancer research. The term biomedicine, while now in common usage remains controversial. Ahrens (p. 34),4 has dismissed it as an overly “inclusive word . . . for the many kind of research . . . whose content runs the gamut from strictly biological to strictly clinical”. Perhaps more dramatically, when the president of the U.S. Biophysical Society argued in a 1999 Nature commentary that the central task of the biomedical enterprise was to “reduce the problems of disease to problems of molecular science”, 7 he was sharply criticized for conflating “biology and medicine into an ill-defined hybrid ‘biomedicine”’.8 One of the reasons for the persistence and resilience of debates about the nature of biomedicine is that while one can indeed speak of a realignment of biology and medicine based on the direct interaction of these two fields since WWII, their relations remain far from seamless and unproblematic.9 Biomedicine handles the relations between the normal and the pathological not in terms of subordination (the reduction of the pathological to the normal) but in terms of mutual enrichment, leading to a complex interweaving of the diverse material and epistemic components of the life sciences.10 Biomedical entities such as surface markers, oncogenes, and genetic signatures participate simultaneously in normal and pathological processes.
Our purpose here is not to propose further definitions of translational research, but to assess whether in recent years anything resembling a translational interface has emerged: we investigate the reality of a phenomenon, rather than attempting to shape its evolution. The emergence and development of biomedicine as a distinctive domain has been analyzed by several authors, using standard historical methods, such as archival work and oral history interviews.9, 11, 12 While these methods offer a “thick description” of historical and social contingencies, their often-limited scope leave them open to criticism. We will thus revisit the issue by resorting to a semi-quantitative approach that involves the analysis of large publication data sets and the visualization of emerging patterns.
Previous contributions to the bibliometric analysis of cancer research were often limited to productivity measures.13, 14 New information visualization tools allow us to make complex relations and configurations visible without reducing them to a few statistical indicators, and thus also to analyze transformations in the organization and content of cancer research. In the present case, we will map the development of cancer research between 1980 and 2000 by examining both the evolving pattern of inter-citations between cancer publications and the transformation of the semantic networks that characterize these relations.
Section snippets
Publication data
We obtained data concerning publications in the cancer field from the CD-ROM version of the Science Citation Index (SCI) produced by Thomson-ISI. The data included, in addition to bibliographic sources, the list of all cited references. From these data, we produced two databases:
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A first database contains the articles published in 121 journals specializing in cancer. One can safely assume that all these articles discuss cancer-related topics and that the database is thus highly specific.
Results
As explained in the Methods section, we analyzed two different databases, i.e., a first database with data concerning the citing behavior of the articles published in 121 cancer specialist journals, and a second database with data on cancer articles regardless of the journals in which they were published. The two databases clearly overlap. Given the already mentioned fact that graphical reasons dictate that the maximum number of journal nodes displayed on a map be limited to approximately 200,
Discussion
Both inter-citation and semantic network maps of cancer research provide striking evidence of the consolidation in the 1990s of a biomedical interface that had barely begun to emerge a few decades before. Our maps show that in 1980, within the broadly defined field of cancer, research was less defined by adherence to sub-domains and more by a generic allegiance to either a clinical or a laboratory style. This same duality obtains in the year 2000, albeit with the additional presence of a third,
Conflict of interest statement
No conflict of interest.
Acknowledgement
Research for this paper was supported by grants from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (MOP-64372), the Fonds québécois de la recherche sur la société et la culture (ER-95786), the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (410-2005-1350), as well as by a CIHR/INSERM 2004-2005 International Exchange Award to AC. We would like to thank the “Observatoire des sciences et des technologies” in Montreal for giving us access to the SCI data.
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