Too often, familiarity and reputation guide target selection for scientific communications. Quantifiable asset performance metrics show the way to more effective publication targeting.
Compass Points: The Future of Medical Affairs is a series exploring the strategic challenges facing Medical Affairs teams in today’s communication landscape—and the tools that will help them get it right.
In the life sciences industries, submitting scientific communications for publication is the culmination of substantial investment. Assets such as research articles and conference abstracts provide valuable context to scientific and clinical data. This work underscores the data-driven mindset of modern Medical Affairs and publications teams.
Yet the selection of publication targets is often driven by qualitative, instead of quantitative, measures. Human bias easily informs journal and conference selection. When decisions result from long-established practice, from familiarity, or from reputation, they lack the fidelity of publication targeting based on defined metrics such as reach.
Publication performance metrics captured from integrated data sources help overcome these limitations. Data-driven choices about scientific communications publication targets are facilitated by measurement tools, such as Compass by Dimensions, characterized by user-defined benchmarking capabilities and publication performance tracking over time.
Incomplete data promotes biased decisions for scientific communications publication targets
For Medical Affairs and publications teams, selecting publication targets is a key element of evidence planning and communication to a variety of stakeholder audiences. Choosing the right publication target means that product-defining data are available to the intended readership, in accordance with strategically-defined time points in the product’s lifecycle. Adding to the complexity, data types, intended readership, and key product messaging will evolve over time.
Furthermore, target selection encompasses a range of content types. This requires understanding which formats are appropriate for a given journal or professional meeting. Teams must decide where to publish peer-reviewed articles, reviews, communications, and other long-form structures, and where to submit primary and encore conference abstracts. Such decisions may still rely on only a limited number of traditional metrics; known examples include journal impact factor, average number of referencing citations per published work, or visits to a publication’s webpage.
However, when availability of publication performance data is limited in this way, instead of thorough, metrics-grounded decision-making, teams turn to qualitative influences. Though provocative, the statement “Better the devil you know” characterizes a persistent, biased, and even emotional selection based on long familiarity with a journal, conference, or editorial team. Despite its ambiguous definition, the reputation of a given journal or meeting in the industry may strongly bias the choice of publication target. As described below, author preferences can also play a role.
Real-world example: which conference to choose?
A new pharmaceutical drug product is in its first year of launch in multiple EMEA markets. Further commercial launches are planned for this region over the next two years. While the therapeutic area is established within the global organization, the product’s treatment modality is new. In this critical lifecycle stage, the Senior Director, Scientific Communications is responsible for the region’s conference publication strategy.
All the elements are in place: robust Launch Excellence structures, the Integrated Evidence Plan, established relationships with Key External Experts (KEES). Up to now, however, the abundance and variety of relevant local-market and EMEA-regional conferences have been difficult to navigate. The KEES are highly engaged, sharing their own recommendations and interests for conferences to target. They expect that these interests will be taken well into consideration during conference decision-making.
How should scientific communications teams structure conference data submission? Going forward, how can our Senior Director colleague make data-driven decisions, instead of selections based on the company’s past conference attendance, or on stakeholder preference?
Without knowledge of reach, critical timelines and audiences are underprioritized
As explored in the first installment of this Compass Points blog series, reach is a quantitative measure of information propagating across channels or networks; for example, in news, social media, podcasting, or clinical commentary. It is a key performance metric for scientific communications.
When publications professionals lack the ability to select publishers, journals, and conferences based on reach, biased decision-making will play a greater role, often leading to delayed decision-making. This comes with risks: extended timelines correlate with increased project costs.
This is magnified when a first submission target becomes unfeasible due to gratuitous edit requests, rejection, or other factors, and the publications team must decide their subsequent target. Elsewhere, lack of reach data may also blind teams to valuable time-dependent opportunities such as early-bird submission mechanisms, or journals’ thematic special editions.
Meaningful reach metrics can therefore support critical project timelines, as well as greater understanding of publication audiences. Today’s audiences are more segmented than ever. Along with parameters such as geography or profession, the readership may represent an intended publication audience, a strategically targeted audience, or a novel audience.
Without comprehensive performance data such as reach metrics, it is more difficult to assess whether a critical audience has connected with a publication. The importance is in the name; without knowledge of reach, Medical Affairs and publications teams lack quantitative confirmation that audiences they seek are, in fact, seeing their research and development outputs.
Additionally, journal articles and conference abstracts may have unrecognized audiences of strategic interest to the Medical Affairs organization. Such groups are varied, and the medical strategy will define their role as (potential) stakeholders. Underappreciated audiences could include physicians in other therapeutic areas, nurses, pharmacists, allied healthcare professionals such as medical technicians, government and regulatory personnel, and patients and patient advocacy. It may be challenging to uncover these relevant groups without publication performance data such as reach. Missing these audiences limits publication influence.
Metrics-grounded target selection supports Medical Affairs across the product lifecycle
In the life sciences industries, product lifecycle spans laboratory evaluation and clinical development, through regulatory approval and commercialization, followed by ongoing product support through post-marketing surveillance, real-world evidence generation, and curation of deeper business insights. As Medical Affairs’ strategic remit continues to expand across the lifecycle, publications teams are responsible for a growing scope of outputs.
With this increase in quantity comes increased complexity. As pharmaceutical drug products and medical technologies move through their product lifecycles, the scientific communications strategies supporting them must necessarily evolve. This occurs as the product profile matures, as further scientific and clinical data become available, as target audiences or geographies shift. Advanced preparation for these shifts allows the publication team to adapt efficiently. That advanced preparation derives in part from reliable publication performance data captured from trusted sources.
Whether maintaining existing publication targets or exploring new opportunities, the ability to track performance data over time promotes efficient decisions about data submission. The parameters that a given Medical Affairs team will prioritize will vary, but useful readouts include a journal’s length of peer review (from submission to publication), number of citations per published work per time period, and quantitative information about reach, engagement, and impact.
In this example, if length of review is steadily increasing, if newer publications are securing fewer citations than historical examples, and if quantitative altmetrics are decreased, it may be time to adjust the target. Clearly-defined, quantitative metrics promote efficient adaptation and serve the product lifecycle.
Such scientific communications performance data supports Medical Affairs in other strategic settings, too. Valuably, information about publication reach, engagement, and impact is available beyond the organization’s current products. This can reinforce market awareness and team readiness when moving into a new product modality or therapeutic area. As performance data are not limited to owned assets, key metrics may be tracked for competitor outputs. Understanding competitor publishing preferences for their long-form works and conference abstracts provides meaningful competitive intelligence insights to Medical Affairs and cross-functional colleagues.
When choosing publication targets, data-driven decision-making is capable decision-making
Now more than ever, performance metrics influence decisions about where, when, and how to publish in the life sciences industries. Scientific communications professionals see the importance of publication targeting based on benchmarks, and on performance data that is trackable over time. The ambiguities and delays of biased, emotionally-driven choices give way to traceability and efficiency.
Meanwhile, senior leadership are counting on metrics-grounded publication targeting that quantifies its value both for the readership and for the business. Using built-for-purpose measurement tools, the ability for Medical Affairs and publications teams to get this right underscores their strategic role as business partners within the organization.
Compass was designed to support data-driven decision-making for publications targeting. Built on Dimensions and Altmetrics data, Compass combines publication and altmetrics into a single collaborative workflow, simplifying how Medical Affairs teams benchmark, track, and manage publication impact and reach.
Compass by Dimensions is developed by Digital Science, an AI-focused technology company that transforms fragmented data into unified knowledge assets, leveraging AI and Knowledge Graphs to deliver structured, actionable intelligence for high-value discovery and innovation. By combining unparalleled data depth and breadth with enterprise-ready AI technology, we help leaders confidently accelerate product life cycles and secure a decisive market lead.
The post Moving from reputation to reach: data-driven decision-making for Medical Affairs publication targets appeared first on Digital Science.
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