Abstract

The analysis of scientific communities and collectives are central to STS and sociological studies of science. However, the current emergence of techno-scientific communities, such as synthetic biology, raises the question as to whether novel identities, but also novel ways of community building have developed. In this respect, the emergence of a new publication regime, the ubiquity of citations as a means of governing attention and visibility, and the establishment of multidisciplinary audiences might have changed the ways of scholarly field formation. In this article I propose that formats of scholarly writing have acquired new functions in this process, changing modes of presenting and legitimating novel scientific communities. Hence, I put forward the idea that the evolution of a specific publication format which I term here as `techno-scientific review article’ and the ways of narrating communities are closely intertwined. To elaborate my argument, I draw on linguistic genre analysis of science. I found that review papers in synthetic biology are important for the field: Equipped with specific textual qualities they become central sites for articulating past and the futures of the field.