Material and Methods
Collecting the data and filtering
iGEM is an open Synthetic Biology competition. Thus, a lot of information is publicly available. All the data for the study was taken from the iGEM website : “
www.igem.org.” Teams from 2008 to 2016 were considered. There were teams before 2008 but the format of their wiki was significantly different. The names of all the teams that have participated till now in iGEM are available on “
http://igem.org/Team_List?year=all”. The list can be downloaded as a comma separated file from the same page. In this file, every team is given a team ID. This is the only unique identity for a time.
More information about the team is available on the team’s information page. For a particular team, the url for the team information page is : “http://igem.org/Team.cgi?team_id=[teamID]” where [teamID] is the team ID. This page contains the team roster where the names and usernames of all the members of the team is included. The members of the team include primary PI, secondary PI, instructors and student members.
Team Wiki
The information about the team’s activity is generated using the team’s wiki. For each team’s wiki, we got a list of all the titles of all the webpages in the website using the wiki API using the following link: “wiki API link”, [Year] is the year in which the team participated and [TeamName] is the team name. The open structure of the wiki allows us to look at the edit history of each page. This can be accessed at “http://[Year].igem.org/wiki/index.php?title=[Title]&action=history” where [Year] is the year in which the team participated and [Title] is the title of the webpage. This page has information about each edit on the page. The information regarding each edit that we used was username, date and location in the text.