Case Study: Innovative Healthcare Company achieves data-driven identification and ranking of scientific KOLs with NetBase Quid

An innovative healthcare client wanted to understand the key opinion leaders from scientific research in a focus area that they needed to understand rapidly

NetBase Quid built a Scientific Key Opinion Leader tool to solve a common healthcare research problem: how to identify and rank both established investigators and emerging researchers across an enormous and noisy literature. Traditional approaches that rely on article counts and citations miss rising stars, hidden co‑author networks, funding signals and shifting topic trends across millions of publications.

Using proprietary NLP, a bespoke ontology and Quid network metrics (betweenness, PageRank) alongside article/journal metrics and funding data from NIH, EC and MRC, Quid filtered broad queries down (from ~1.7M to ~2k relevant PubMed records), applied a weighted percentile ranking (article count, citations, recency, SJR, last authorship, funding/grants) and produced network maps, geographic heatmaps and deep dives on the top 20 KOLs. The result: a defensible, nuanced ranking that surfaces both high‑impact PIs and rising talent, reveals collaboration and media networks, and supports targeted research, partnership and funding decisions.