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Editorial
. 2005:1:2005.0012.
doi: 10.1038/msb4100016. Epub 2005 May 25.

Is there biological research beyond Systems Biology? A comparative analysis of terms

Peer Bork
Editorial

Is there biological research beyond Systems Biology? A comparative analysis of terms

Peer Bork. Mol Syst Biol. 2005.
No abstract available

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Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1
Acceptance of research fields that are driven by the generation of massive amounts of molecular data. Occurrences of selected terms in MEDLINE titles and abstracts over the last 10 years were measured. To compare tendencies, the number of occurrences in each year divided by the total number of occurrences over 10 years is shown. In 2004, ‘Systems Biology' was mentioned 124 times. In comparison, Genomics occurred 1188 times, Proteomics 958, Bioinformatics 243, other relevant ‘omics' 194, ‘Computational Biology' 39 and ‘Synthetic Biology' 13. This should be seen in the context of classical disciplines such as Biology 4343 (of which ‘Cell Biology' 510), Genetics 2118 and Biochemistry 783. Although this simplistic counting implies lots of biases, it clearly shows that ‘Systems Biology' has had a sharp increase in awareness (most of the articles are reviews, not all of them using this term are sympathetic). This awareness is also supported by a comparison with Bioinformatics/‘Computational Biology' in respect to conference attendance. It took the currently largest (still growing) bioinformatics conference (ISMB with 2200 participants in 2004) 7 years to grow to 650 attendees, but the currently largest systems biology conference (ICSB) attained 780 participants in only 5 years. (Both conferences were in Heidelberg and were oversubscribed.) Note that a successful discipline with fuzzy borders always leads to spin-offs (subterms such as ‘Functional Genomics'). Some of these took off despite being unfortunate, like ‘Structural Genomics', which is really about proteomics.
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