The Development of Public Perception Research in the Genomics Field: An Empirical Analysis of the Literature in the Field

This article describes a meta-analysis that was conducted on the subjects of published academic research on the public perception of genomics. In total, 451 journal articles were analyzed, all published between 1970 and 2006 and sampled from the databases Web of Science and Scopus. Results indicate the increasing popularity of research on this topic in the last decade, which reflects the same curve as media coverage of the new technology. Many authors study the public perception of genomics, but only a small number are productive. There is a strong focus on food and agriculture genomics and a separate field of authors and journals for medical genomics. The authors make several recommendations for future developments in the public perception of genomics.