The Kardashian Effect: How Celebrity Culture Influences Research Trends

Garth Sundem  00:00

Garth, welcome to this episode of the medical affairs professional society podcast series, Elevate. I’m your host, Garth Sundem, and today we’re exploring the intersectionality of medical affairs and Kardashian studies. Unfortunately, I don’t really know what intersectionality means, and I certainly don’t know anything about the Kardashians, which is why we have with us. Mike Taylor, Head of Data Insights at Altmetric, and Carlos Areia, Senior Data Scientist at Altmetric. This episode is sponsored by Altmetric parent company, Digital Science. So Mike, please, tell me how and why we’ve reached this point in our interactions and conversations today. Why are we talking about the Kardashians?

Mike Taylor  00:52

Wow. Well, we’re talking about the Kardashians because Carlos and I were invited to write a chapter about Kardashian studies in a rather splendid book called The Kardashians, a critical anthology. Now a chapter is called in the lab with the Kardashians. Oh, dear. This did. This started. That was 18 months ago, and I was in Oxford, Sheldonian theater, a library, sorry, Radcliffe camera, and I was, I’m researching part of my PhD, and I’m writing the introduction, and that’s really about the history of of research. And it goes back to 350, years. And I’d read this amazing chapter from a guy called uh Bishop, Thomas Spratt, who was writing in 1660 and he was wrote this book celebrating the first 10 years of academic publishing, scholarly publishing. I’m going to come back and talk about this in more detail. I’m enormously keen about this. But sprat realized, as did most of the Royal Society, that if you want people to engage with science and and understand science, then you have to make it interesting and entertaining and engaging and relevant and all of those stuff. And I like this. I’m going to come back, and I will, I will talk about this in great detail. But the point is, this was the message that we learned in 1660 you can’t just be this sort of dry academic and expect people like HCPs like doctors, because they were talking to doctors at that time, you can’t expect them to to not engage with things that are bright and boring and irrelevant. One of the things that they published, right at the very beginning of European scientific publishing was this was this post mortem of this notorious character, a real libertine guy called the Earl of Bauer Karis. You can go online his post mortem, published in 1665, or whatever it was. It’s got a DOI and they got all of this guy’s body, and they cut him up and they examined his organs. And you can read it as a morality story, if you like, but it’s also a story of like, what you do to your body. If you’re a notorious libertine, you drink a lot, you’re diseased all the rest. And I’m not going to suggest that the world of pharmaceutical Medical Affairs would be more attractive to a broader population if we did clinical trial studies on the Kardashians. But there’s, there’s a link here to how can we communicate, how can we instill the values of attractiveness in our in our research, to encourage people to engage with it. We know that publicity and talking about research has downstream effect on how people are treated. There was a fantastic study published in 1991 by Philips et al in New England, Journal of Medicine, that explored the effects of research being covered by the New York Times during the 1990s fascinating study. Happy to put a link in in the show notes to that what I’m saying. And we said this again with our podcast that we did with you at the top 10 publications in in the fall last year, putting a piece of research into a journal is fantastic, and that’s a really important thing to do, but you can do so much more to commit that to a broader audience. And in the case of the podcast, we found a couple of articles where the lead editor, the lead author, rather, had done a really fantastic and engaging video for I think it was for jammer oncology. I think it was and that you can see the effect of having that video has in the discourse around that article and I contributed another one in a rare disease. Area where there was a case study history of a family that that that was was used to to to pin that research. So I came out of the theater, out of the library, I’m so enthusiastic, and I bump into a friend of mine called Kath Burton. Kath for the K and she said, Go away and find out about the Kardashians, because she had just started writing, editing a book about the Kardashian studies and intersectionality and all that kind of stuff. I went away. There are 1000s of articles that use the Kardashians case studies and examples and illustrations and all sorts of other things. There’s, there’s, this is the second edition of the book. There’s even a couple of events called the conference, spelled the k of course, and Carlos and I were being invited to contribute this book. I wouldn’t have known a Kardashian if, if one of them stood up in my suit. I’ve got to be honest with you, Garth, it’s not my area of research. But what we found was really interesting. And I think that the approach that we took to to analyze this corpus, to analyze this set of documents, has a relevance to medical affairs that perhaps isn’t immediately obvious.

Garth Sundem  06:14

Okay, let’s get into what in the world we’re looking at here. Well, so first of all, 350 years of publication, science has now led us to what seems sort of a pinnacle moment where we find ourselves talking about the Kardashians, starting with sprout and the Earl of barrel of carrots, is what I heard you Say, which probably isn’t something like that Carla’s. So you were you were working on this book chapter about Kardashian science. There’s an article with some lovely visualizations. What are we looking at first or let me ask, What in the world did you do to make sense of the landscape of Kardashian science.

Carlos Areia  07:03

So yeah, thank you, Garth, yes. I just thought it was funny to see like the pinnacle, everything lead to our Kardashian research so curiously and again, tying all of this with medical affairs, I use the pipeline that we usually use for most of our customers, and we use a known technology that’s been around for a for for a while, which is clustering. So we’ve matched like the basically we feed it the the algorithm with the information from the publications and created clusters that we can then split, slice and dice and analyze and describe throughout the chapter. And this, again, both me and Mike, we love clustering because sometimes, more often than not, usually allows us to find emerging topics and by looking at co occurrences between titles and abstracts or inside publications, and that usually highlights trends and signals. So this is a technology that we usually use with our customers in a completely different context, of course, but in the case of the Kardashians, it allowed us to identify, identify five clusters that we could then explore the individual publications and later the social media attention tied to each one. And very broadly speaking, was, I think we split into five clusters, wealth, influence, social networks, one another. Was about feminism, politics and social change. Another was around celebrity, celebratory fame and public identity, sexuality, gender and mental well being. So those are like, very briefly, speaking, the five people can go and read the chapter if they wanted, but these would then allowed us to split. And you can think of it like we usually what we do for our customers, like split by therapeutic areas or products or anything else. And the analysis was quite similar to what we usually do, and yes, and we found some very interesting insights for the Kardashians, but that’s like the in terms of the methodology. This is something that me and Mike, we’ve been doing for the past two or three years. Okay, so

Garth Sundem  09:32

looking through a very similar lens at very different data than you would usually be looking at, okay, so we’ve got these five clusters. And first you look at these clusters in terms of what the research is writing about. Great, you know, it’s the title the abstracts. You’ve got these five clusters that people are writing about now. Is that, is that the same as what people are citing and tweeting, you know, is what the researchers are writing about, what people, beyond the researchers, actually care about, are those the same thing?

Carlos Areia  10:16

Well, it does, it does differ a bit, and I think that’s another thing that was quite curious and sometimes similar to what happens in medical affairs, that sometimes what companies put out there, and the expectation that how it was produced is not the same as how it is received by the consumer and by the reader. So the there was some patterns, some interesting patterns emerging when we started linking this research to their citations and and the social media, okay? And I’m not going to do all the spoil around the Kardashians, because we want people to read our chapter, of course, and, but, but yeah, but asking your question, yes, there was some different, yeah, different results between what was published and what was

Garth Sundem  11:07

cited and what was tweeted. So, I mean, just, just to put a peg in that, it’s, it’s a very stark demonstration that what the researchers chose to write about is not necessarily what resonated in the external landscape, and you can see that in these clusters about the Kardashians, but you could also see that about a disease state, or about a therapy, or things that may be even more relevant to medical affairs than the Kardashians.

Carlos Areia  11:40

Yeah, especially so when we started, I think we’ve talked in another podcast about how we created, like demographic groups and some things that are completely unexpected resonate to a particular public, like, for example, a group of rare diseases patient or a group of cardiologists. So and well, here in this chapter, the Kardashians, we kept it quite broad, like an overall lens. But usually when we dig in with with our with our partners, we start focusing on specific, like demographic groups or specific and see what resonates. And again, similar when we use like clustering, and that’s why we like it so much, is sometimes what we find is quite different from what we expect,

12:30

absolutely. Yeah,

Garth Sundem  12:31

well, that’s interesting. So again, and we’ll link this from the podcast, but we started with what the researchers are writing about in the terms of their title and abstract, and then we look at how that’s received in or amplified in terms of citations and also in terms of tweets. But you’re saying that for most medical affairs applications, it wouldn’t just be everyone who’s citing this, or everyone who’s tweeting this, but let’s look at what people are talking about in certain demographic groups. Let’s look at let’s look at how this is received, not across the entire landscape, but received by the people who matter. And that’s what more often in medical affairs,

Carlos Areia  13:20

exactly. And then did something that we actually did for the Kardashians as well. We we can start to use some qualifying, not only like what that they are talking about it, but the sentiment behind it. So we and even for this chapter, we’ve applied and things, and we saw some patterns in terms of polarity of sentiment when we did a sentiment analysis to the to this data set and on the clusters

Garth Sundem  13:52

right, because in Kardashian studies, perhaps any publicity is good publicity. But in the world of medical affairs, perhaps we would like positive publicity, rather than just the fact of a lot of conversations taking place in a lot of places. So what did you see in the Kardashian landscape when you looked not only add the volume of people talking about these five clusters, but how they felt about these five clusters?

Carlos Areia  14:26

Yeah, so I think it’s like everything else. So there are some topics that are more controversial than others. So I think if I remember correctly, in the Kardashians like clusters, like the wealth influence in social networks and fame public identity were at the most positive slash neutralish sentiment, whereas, as one can expect, like sexuality, gender and the identity surrounding it at the most polarized sentiment in the discussions. So

Mike Taylor  14:57

yeah, you’re right. I’m looking we’ve seen. Hmm, we’ve seen polarization in in in many different areas. It’s always really quite interesting, because, broadly speaking, most medical affairs related research is, is, is, is weekly positive. So people are going on to social media and they’re saying, Oh, interesting paper coming out, something like that, you don’t get that much negative attention. When you do get negative attention, it’s really interesting. There was an example of a drug that was released a couple of years ago. Sorry, it had approval a couple of years ago. I’m not going to name the name the drug. I’m sure everyone could figure it out. But when it was released, there was a lot of positive sense. It was considered to be a breakthrough in a particular area. But within a week or two, people were digging into the numbers and saying quite a lot of adverse effects here. Actually, the effect isn’t quite as strong as we thought it was. And then you can actually look at the timeline, if you section it so you’re just looking at what HCPs, what medics are thinking about it, you can see that they were very positive to start with, and much less positive. They weren’t negative, but they were that positivity sort of rose and then dropped over time, whereas the broader population continued being really quite positive about it. So you see this sort of segmentation of discourse by demographic. I can say that without sounding like a social scientist, you see it quite often. It’s not just in areas of controversiality, such as Carlos is talking about, oh,

Garth Sundem  16:40

when’s the next edition to the book? You guys gotta, you’ve gotta, you’ve gotta tie the Kardashian sentiment to the news cycle. And you could maybe see these clusters go positive sentiment when, I don’t know, someone adopts a puppy, and negative sentiment, when, when they all do the evil things. Oh, sorry, I’m editorializing. But you could look at not only the snapshots of of how this information is received, both in terms of volume of conversation and the second conversation, not only broadly, but within certain demographic groups or certain interest groups, and not only Kardashians as a whole, but these five clusters that you’ve negated. But you could also look at how that is affected by different actions, and I wonder if that presents an opportunity to use a metric like this to keep an eye on the impact of medical affairs activities. If we do see we have a publication, is that a is that a place in time that changes the volume and changes the sentiment. Yeah, it can

Carlos Areia  18:03

be, for example, like if a particular Kol shares their opinion on it, and then can trigger action of positivity or negativity, depending on

Garth Sundem  18:17

right or you have a new, I don’t know, phase four study, or something come out, or real world. And so you’re looking at something that changes the landscape, or it does get something in the popular press, it gets attention, yeah, well,

Carlos Areia  18:30

we’ve got additional index as well that you can use.

Mike Taylor  18:33

Oh, boy, oh yeah, that’s another hole we’re gonna dive down. Okay, I did want to, if I can, just briefly mention the the effect of of using the Kardashians as an example, because I think it’s really interesting. So we, we’ve benchmarked our clusters against this, the similar set of publications. And so for example, we you might look at articles that mentioned the Kardashians in the context of inter intersectionality, which is this merging of the private and the personal. And if you compare it with a baseline, you find that the they get twice the amount of impact, twice the amount of citations. I think this is a really good example of and it kind of goes back to that 1991 article in ng that if your research has a higher profile, then it will get more get more attention. Kind of see this actually, it looks like we’re seeing this in clinical guidelines. So you know, if you look at those longitudinal studies, when you get approval, you get a jump up in attention when you get mentioned in the guideline, you can, you can see jump jumps as well. It’s almost more interesting when you don’t see the jump shift. I mean, what’s going on there? You know? What? Why are you not getting the attention? I think this is the thing that really starts opening up. You know, we’re on the verge of being able to use some really clever technologies to get real insights out of the data of our publications. You know what? What Carlos hasn’t mentioned is that normally, when we’re doing clustering, we kind of know what we’re looking for, right? So we we know that we’ve got h e r studies in the mix, and we know that h e r studies don’t get as much attention as a phase three trial. In this case, neither Carlos and I knew anything about the Kardashians, so we were taking this approach of running the data through the analyzer and then seeing what clusters popped up, but you can tune into algorithms, and there’s going to be more of this with increasing use of AI. So this idea of sort of ad hoc understanding of what’s finding attention, you know, how does and not just in sort of subject clusters, but even what language is working, how how you talk about things, what publication extenders are doing, how that is interesting. I think there’s I’m so excited about the future of medical affairs and the sort of the science of communications, because it’s all about trying to get better treatments to the patients. And, you know, winning the winning, winning, not just the minds of the medical profession, but the hearts as well. You can only do that through good communication. And

Garth Sundem  21:34

going back to knowing what you’re listening for, we’ve talked about this in the context of insights before where you have your listening priorities, you have your five things that you’re going to listen for, but then you also have the ability to open your ears and see what emerges. And it seems like that’s what you did with this Kardashian study to find these five clusters you didn’t know from the start that you were going to be looking at wealth, celebrity, gender, mental, well being you, you asked the landscape to return. What is interesting and and these are the clusters that that came out of it. I mean, is, is emergent insights compared with listening priorities, one of the uses of this kind of clustering that you see,

Mike Taylor  22:33

I mean, I think that in some ways, it’s like using an old fashioned kaleidoscope. I don’t know if you’re old enough Garth to remember those cardboard tube who look down for this crystal. You turn the thing to the bottom, and you see different patterns. And as you turn it around, so that pattern changes, and using AI and doing clustering using algorithms is a little bit like that. You have to have the eye of the beholder to use that, because sometimes you focus it and you can see one kind of cluster, and you turn it around a bit when you see a different one, you have to know what makes sense to you. And this is where, and you know the people you’re working for that this is where I think that the humanity comes into AI, that it’s a tool that gives us lots of different variations and lots of different ways of under different ways of understanding the data, but it doesn’t give us the answer. We have to recognize that. And again, you know, to talk about the heart. What resonates with the heart and what is going to resonate with the people who are consuming the the research? Okay? So from this point of view, we found five clusters the way that we looked at it. We looked at it a different way. We might have found one or three or 14, but for five, felt like it’s an interesting gel. And in fact, if you look at the graphs that we use an application called boss Neil, which is free and you can download and play around with it, there are four main clusters, and there’s another cluster that spreads around them. That’s the fifth cluster. It sort of spreads all over it. It’s sort of all in it’s pretty much all in those four. It’s really interesting. It’s like cluster that joins all the other clusters, but it’s a weakly defined cluster. And for me, I think it’d be really interesting to do this in therapeutic areas, to to take a sort of a neutral look, if you like, to be the observer of what’s going on within the within a field, and then to see, well, what’s working, what’s connecting with people. How are people? How are different HCPs reacting to this, this miasma, this cloud of research

Garth Sundem  24:44

that’s being put out around and this. We should do this. We should do this. We should do Yeah, and this cluster seems to be very, very tight and obvious, whereas this other cluster seems to be an underlying theme of all the other. Clusters. It’s never only represented in one place, but it’s an underlying information or sentiment that seems to that seems to underlie all the clusters. Okay, we’re almost out of time, but we can’t leave without learning what the Kardashian index is Carlos, what in the world is the Kardashian index?

Carlos Areia  25:21

Well, the Kardashian index is basically a measure of measure that measure, basically a metric that measures the balance between citations and followers. So the Kardashian index will tell you if you are a highly cited researcher but lower in terms of social media, in terms of following, or if you are a unicorn with both, or if you are just like a digital opinion leader with not a lot of research yet, basically, will Capture and encapsulate these three or four personas between Kol, Kol and unicorn. That that one can measure it is a satirical metric, but, but, you know,

Mike Taylor  26:11

I wonder whether we shouldn’t put a paper on this and find out whether it correlates with Kol status as as as defined by their peers. That would be really interesting. I also think you’d be really interesting.

Garth Sundem  26:26

I also think you should trademark this and put it alongside impact the I wish

Mike Taylor  26:30

someone else came up with the cake the Kardashian index, sadly. Yeah, we come up with a come up with our own. But interestingly, I mean, it is really interesting that you say that. I mean, there are so many ways of looking at how well form on social media. Carlos done some great work looking at networks of communication. We found, for example, now, if you look at some leading KOLs, you can see that the people that they are following, and they interact with our people, who are scientists. You know, they’re doing the cutting edge science, but the people who are following the KOLs are tend to be lower, seniority, earlier, various stage, medics, scientists. So you you kind of have that. You think, Okay, well, that’s quite a lot of noise, but essentially, what it means is that the Senior KO wells are acting as a bridge between the science and the the other population. So if you flip that around, because I know that these people are senior KOLs, you might say, well, who are the people who look like bridges but aren’t KOLs? Yeah, who aren’t senior Kol and this is where you might start thinking, Oh, are they influencers? What does that mean in the Medical Affairs context? I think there’s so there is a world of research to be done in this space and practical findings.

Garth Sundem  27:51

And that is your Kardashian index. All right. Well, we we are out of time, despite the fact that we could talk about the Kardashians for hours and hours and hours. Mike and Carlos, but thank you to learn more about how your organization can partner with Digital Science, visit digital-science.com. MAPS members, don’t forget to subscribe. And we hope you enjoyed this special episode of the Medical Affairs Professional Society podcast series, Elevate.