Who has influence on the debate on Stem Cells in Scandinavia (Denmark, Norway and Sweden)?

We recently published a report on who publish the debate on Stem Cells in the Scandinavian countries (Denmark, Norway and Sweden).

Table 1 shows the top influencers on the topic of “Stem Cells” in the Scandinavia.

The organisations in table 1 all have an Issue Influence Index™ on this topic of 1.8 or more.
Issue Influence Index™ is a generic measure of influence.

It measures both direct and indirect influence and is calculated like a citation index used to calculate influence of academic journals.

The scale is linear, ranging from 1 (one ) and upwards. An index of 1 can be interpreted as “no particular influence”. A stakeholder with an index of 4 can be interpreted as having twice the influence as someone who has an index of 2.

The table shows that the most influential organisation is the US Department of Health and Human Services’ National Institutes of Health (NIH). NIH is an index of health resources and may not provide any data of their own.

NIH is cited by many of the other stakeholders in the relevant context (stem cells) and from a strictly mathematical point of view they are the most influential. However, one can argue that as they do not provide their own content they mainly convey the influence of others. That said the editorial process of NIH whereby they include some resources and exclude others (that they don’t deem relevant) is in fact a way of providing content of their own. So as part of their editorial process they do exercise their own influence.

The second most influential organisation is the BBC. The BBC is the world’s largest news organisation. The annual budget of the BBC is quite precisely 10 times bigger than that of University of Copenhagen. When an issue is on the public agenda – such as stem cells has been – the BBC usually plays a role in shaping the public opinion; especially in the UK, the north western part of the EU and Scandinavia.

It is interesting to observe the absence of Danish organisations among the top influencers. Apart from BioMed Community, a community representing the Bio- & Medical technology competences in Aalborg, Denmark and BioTIK a portal focusing on bio-ethical questions, the most influential Danish player is Retsinformation a state sponsored information system on legal issues. This could indicate that legal red tape is relatively more of a factor in Denmark than in the two other countries.

The most influential representatives from Sweden and Norway (University of Oslo, University of Lund, Karolinska Institutet and Uppsala University) are largely those one would expect to have a prominent position, the most influential research institutions from Denmark are University of Southern Denmark and University of Aalborg; two of the newest universities in Denmark.

Figure 1 (below) shows how organisations from Table 1 (above) reference each other.

The direction of the arrow shows the reference. The influence is consequently the other way.

The size of the dot representing each organisation is proportional to their total influence.

(Unfortunately the program generating the picture does not support Unicode characters which are used to represent Scandinavian letters.)

An extended resume of the report can be downloaded here (pdf, 2 MB)