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

• Published in: PloS one Vol. 14; no. 12; p. e0225500
• Main Authors: Rollin, Guillaume, Lages, José, Serebriyskaya, Tatiana S, Shepelyansky, Dima L
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: United States Public Library of Science 04.12.2019; Public Library of Science (PLoS)
• Subjects: Algorithms; Archives & records; Bioinformatics; Biology and Life Sciences; Breast cancer; Cancer; Computational Complexity; Computer Science; Diseases; Drug Industry - economics; Encyclopedias; Friendship; Humans; Internationality; Internet; Kidney diseases; Life Sciences; Marketing; Medicine and Health Sciences; Neoplasms - drug therapy; Network analysis; Penicillin; Pharmaceutical industry; Pharmaceutical sciences; Pharmaceuticals; Physical Sciences; Rare Diseases - drug therapy; Research and Analysis Methods; Search engines; Social and Information Networks; Social Sciences; Statistics, Nonparametric; United Kingdom; Iran; United States; Germany; France
• ISSN: 1932-6203; 1932-6203
• DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0225500

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.