Identification of key opinion leaders in healthcare domain using weighted Social Network Analysis

Abstract

Key Opinion Leaders commonly referred to as thought leaders which play very important role in life science industry. We introduce the concept of identifying key opinion leaders using weighted Social Network Analysis (SNA). We use European PubMed Central dataset for creating weighted social network of healthcare related people and apply different centrality measures on it. We compare the centrality results of weighted and un-weighted social networks as well as weighted social network with PageRank and HITS algorithm. Initial experiments indicate that centrality results of weighted social network works 11 out 12 times better than un-weighted social networks and covers all the important results out of HITS and PageRank algorithm.