KOL Identification That Starts with Your Strategy , not a Generic List.
Identify the experts who matter for your specific product, mechanism, and strategy, not just those most visible at a global level.
The challenge
The problem with most KOL lists.
You probably already know most of the names on them.
Your team needs to know which experts understand your mechanism, are engaged in the evidence you are building on, and can influence the clinical communities that matter to your launch.
Most identification draws on similar data and applies similar scoring logic, regardless of the provider: overall publication volume, citation counts, and senior roles in major medical specialty societies. Because these systems must operate across thousands of disease areas and clients, they rely on markers of influence that can be captured and applied consistently at scale. Prominence within a specialty becomes the starting point, and the scoring is designed to generalise, not to answer your specific question.
A leading specialist is not always the right expert for your product. In complex conditions, broad clinical standing can mask gaps in specific disease knowledge or patient experience — and the senior names your scoring surfaces are the ones your competitors are already engaging too. Whether the list came from a global platform or a specialist provider, if it started with who is prominent and narrowed down, the same names get missed. Not because they don’t exist, but because the methodology was not built to find them.
What this means in practice
We begin with the exact context of your product and what you need your KOL engagement to achieve.
01
A shortlist you can defend in governance, launch planning, and Medical review — not just a longer list of familiar names
02
Disease-level expertise identified alongside specialty-level prominence, so you see who's actually relevant, not just who's visible
03
Regional leaders, emerging voices, and specialists not yet captured in standard datasets, sitting alongside the obvious top tier
04
A KOL list designed with your engagement strategy in mind
05
Detailed information on each KOL, so you know who to engage, when, and why
what makes a difference in practice
Where standard identification breaks down
The gap between the two approaches is particularly clear in the following situations.
The mechanism is new, or the field is still forming
Where the scientific community is small and established KOLs may not yet exist, standard methods fall short. We identify early signals of influence and, where relevant, experts from adjacent fields likely to move into the space.
Clinical decision making varies by country or setting
In some conditions, who makes the treatment decision depends on the healthcare system or care pathway. Identification must reflect how decisions are actually made, not how specialties are defined on paper.
Engagement with guideline authors is restricted
In some markets, compliance constraints limit direct engagement with certain guideline contributors. Identification must map the wider expert network shaping those recommendations, including those who influence without being listed.
Capabilities
Capabilities worth knowing about
Expert interviews as primary research
Where appropriate, we complement desk research with targeted expert interviews to identify who is most respected by established KOLs, understand how clinical thinking is evolving, and surface dynamics not visible in published sources.
Global reach and understanding
Our work combines in-language research, local knowledge, and manual validation to reflect where influence actually sits.
For example, global platforms underrepresent expertise in Japan and China due to language barriers, local publication channels, the absence of regional congresses from international databases, and transliteration inconsistencies that make automated identification unreliable.
case study
What clients find when they compare approaches.
Teams who have worked with large-scale platforms describe the same differences: shortlists composed differently, with regional leaders and emerging experts alongside globally visible figures, a clear rationale for each inclusion, and guidelines or working groups they were not previously aware of.
What clients find when they compare approaches.
Teams who have worked with large-scale platforms describe the same differences: shortlists composed differently, with regional leaders and emerging experts alongside globally visible figures, a clear rationale for each inclusion, and guidelines or working groups they were not previously aware of.
The challange
A respiratory mechanism, distorted by COVID-19 publication volume.
standard approach
Publication-led scoring would have surfaced the wrong experts.
what changed
A bespoke scoring framework, built around how influence actually operates in this field.
01
Four literature analyses isolated genuine mechanism expertise from COVID-19 publication volume.
02
Expert interviews surfaced a private international working group the client hadn't known existed.
03
The group's leader came from a specialty the client hadn't originally prioritised.
The outcome
-
433 experts identified across 8 countries
-
A private working group and its leader surfaced, previously unknown to the client
-
Five further projects commissioned since
Tell us about your expert landscape
If your current KOL list does not reflect your scientific and strategic reality, or you are heading into an area where standard identification is likely to fall short, we want to understand the challenge.
