PLoS ONE (Jan 2019)

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

  • Guillaume Rollin,
  • José Lages,
  • Tatiana S Serebriyskaya,
  • Dima L Shepelyansky

DOI
https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0225500
Journal volume & issue
Vol. 14, no. 12
p. e0225500

Abstract

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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.