Ethical Considerations and Design of Metric to Identify Key Opinion Leaders in Research

This paper developed a new scheme to identify Key Opinion Leaders in research, based on design of methodology and approaches that are ethical and scientifically sound. Expositions were made to elucidate on ethical issues relevant in the design of appropriate approaches for identifying Key Opinion Leaders in research. The developed methodology is a rational approach for evaluating Average Percentile Rank of individual researcher by measuring their collaborative strength through their published works. The study considered and introduced new parameters useful in measuring collaboration, and Average Percentile Rank. With these parameters, a new relationship to quantify Percentile Rank was introduced and applied to evaluate the Research Key Opinion Leader status of individual research staffs of INGENIO, the joint research institute of the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC) and the Polytechnic University of Valencia (UPV), Spain. The total number of research staff at INGENIO was studied. Overall, the result shows that, number of persons collaborating in a particular research, and the relative positions of the collaborators among their peers and within their organization are relevant and important in determining the KOL status of a researcher.