Interactions of pharmaceutical companies with world countries, cancers and rare diseases from Wikipedia network analysis

PLoS One. 2019 Dec 4;14(12):e0225500. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0225500. eCollection 2019.

Abstract

Using the English Wikipedia network of more than 5 million articles we analyze interactions and interlinks between the 34 largest pharmaceutical companies, 195 world countries, 47 rare renal diseases and 37 types of cancer. The recently developed algorithm using a reduced Google matrix (REGOMAX) allows us to take account both of direct Markov transitions between these articles and also of indirect transitions generated by the pathways between them via the global Wikipedia network. This approach therefore provides a compact description of interactions between these articles that allows us to determine the friendship networks between them, as well as the PageRank sensitivity of countries to pharmaceutical companies and rare renal diseases. We also show that the top pharmaceutical companies in terms of their Wikipedia PageRank are not those with the highest market capitalization.

Publication types

  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

  • Algorithms
  • Drug Industry* / economics
  • Humans
  • Internationality*
  • Internet*
  • Marketing
  • Neoplasms / drug therapy*
  • Rare Diseases / drug therapy*
  • Statistics, Nonparametric

Grants and funding

J.L. was supported by ANR-15-IDEX-0003, Programme Investissements d’Avenir, ISITE-BFC (project GNETWORKS), http://i-site.ubfc.fr; and Bourgogne Franche-Comté region (project APEX), https://www.bourgognefranchecomte.fr. D.S. was supported by ANR-11-IDEX-0002-02, reference ANR-10-LABX-0037-NEXT, Programme Investissements d’Avenir (project THETRACOM), http://www.next-toulouse.fr. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.