Share of Voice: understanding how your research is reaching a real-world audience
Mike Taylor, Head of Data Insights, and Carlos Areia Data Scientist from Digital Science caught up with Garth Sundem, Communications Director at Medical Affairs Professional Society (MAPS).
Share of Scientific Voice
For several years Digital Science, using Altmetric data, have been working on Scientific Share of Voice (SSoV) to tackle difficulties medical affairs teams have in tracking how research is being used and what products may be being used in research.
Altmetric provides data about where research and clinical trials are being shared, in social media, in policy documents and so on. However, until the last few years, it wasn’t being presented in a way that would make sense to medical affairs professionals.
In their recent catch up, Mike and Carlos, speak to Garth from MAPS about how by closely working with medical affairs professionals they have been able to create bespoke dashboards. These dashboards allow med affairs professionals to easily benchmark, see what works and what doesn’t, and measure activity on Twitter.
The ideas for these dashboards came directly from medical affairs.
Going beyond the numbers
Coming from the clinical community, Carlos speaks about his own experience in the importance of engaging with different stakeholder groups, which became even more crucial with the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. Carlos and his team were able to implement their research in less than a month, which would not have been possible without engaging with stakeholders.
What else was important? To see how the research was being used, such as how it was impacting policy. It can take years to see research be implemented into guidelines for example, or to be used by clinicians. However, what can be seen quickly is how people are tweeting about the research. This is where Share of Voice comes in.
Demonstrating the real-world impact of Share of Voice
Share of Voice is increasingly about ensuring that healthcare professionals (HCPs) are aware of the value of products. Published documents may receive audiences in high profile journals, but that is just the starting point towards the endless march towards the hospital environment, where you are hoping the patient is getting the best treatment. And this is only going to happen when the diagnosing physician is aware of the research.
Physicians get their information via multiple sources. What we’re doing is making all that data simpler, helping medical affairs professionals navigate the volume of data so they can see what did and did not work, from congresses to journals.
Who is talking about your research?
As Scientific Share of Voice can be used to see who is talking about your research, it can be used to identify Key Opinion Leaders (KOLs) and Digital Opinion Leaders (DOLs). With our solutions we can harness the data from publications to discover emergent KOLs and DOLs, who for example, may have been tweeting a lot about particular research. Using machine learning we can look at matching the two – DOLs who are also KOLs.