Pharmaceutical Blogging and Online Distribution of Information

Abstract

The hypothesis behind this research was that the rise of blogs as a rich information source may provide a challenge to the traditionally held view of a ‘key opinion leader’ in the drugs and health public domain. We have employed network analysis methods to determine the emergent connectivity in the self-publishing domain of the internet (known as blogs), the referral links between individual blogs, and the semantic context of blog text. The results reveal that inspite of high volume of blogs, only a small number are interlinked, and the emerging network configuration is a small core component with a large number of dyads, or short tails. The public opinion broadcasted in blogs shows differentiation related to specific health issues or pharmaceutical companies. Our findings support the conclusion that inspite of the high technical connectivity provided by the search engines and internet crawling tools, social connectivity is limited.

Keywords: European pharmaceuticals, Blogs, Distributed Intelligence systems, Online self-publishing

JEL Classification: O3