Identification of Key Opinion Leaders in Pharmaceutics Using Network Analysis

Abstract

The term Key Opinion Leader in marketing is not new. Key Opinion Leaders (KOLs) commonly known as thought leaders who play a crucial role in the life science industry. We through this project intend to implement the concept of identifying key opinion leaders using weighted Social Network Analysis (SNA). We intend to use European PubMed Central dataset for creating a weighted social Network of authors who have healthcare and medicine related publications and apply different centrality measures on it. In order to collect the data, we will be using one of the web scraping methods and predefined libraries like scrapy. After fetching and processing the data we intend to form a network of authors using python’s NetworkX library. This network will then be subjected to various centrality measures which in turn will give prominent opinion leaders as the output.