The life sciences landscape is becoming intensely competitive and knowing what your brand stands scientifically and how loudly your brand’s message resonates compared to competitors has never been more critical. Yet many medical affairs teams still struggle to quantify their scientific presence in a meaningful, consistent way.
Enter Scientific Share of Voice (SSoV): a metric that is rapidly becoming one of the most important tools in the medical affairs toolkit. And if your team isn’t measuring it yet, you may already be falling behind.
What Is Scientific Share of Voice?
Share of voice is a concept that has long existed in marketing, which measures how much of the total conversation in a given space your brand owns. Scientific Share of Voice brings this same principle into the medical and scientific domain.
In the context of medical affairs, measuring scientific influence in pharma means tracking your brand’s relative presence across the channels where scientific dialogue happens. This includes conferences and congresses, peer-reviewed publications, clinical trials, and increasingly, social and digital platforms where Key Opinion Leaders (KOLs) and Digital Opinion Leaders (DOLs) drive conversation.
Simply put, SSoV answers the question: In the scientific conversations that matter most to your therapy area, how prominently does your brand feature and how does that compare to competitors?
Why Medical Affairs Teams Should Consider Gauging their Brand’s SSOV
For years, medical affairs performance metrics have focused on activity-based indicators: number of medical science liaison (MSL) interactions, publications submitted, symposia attended. While these metrics have their place, they tell you what your team did, not what impact it had in the broader scientific ecosystem.
The shift toward outcome-oriented measurement is driving medical affairs leaders to ask harder questions:
- Are we present at the conferences where our therapy area’s most influential discussions are taking place?
- How does our publication footprint compare to competitors in terms of volume, reach, and sentiment?
- Are the KOLs most associated with our therapeutic space aligned with our brand — or a competitor’s?
- What does the clinical trial landscape tell us about where research momentum is heading?
These are not questions that can be answered by tracking field force activity alone. They require a broader, data-driven view of the scientific landscape, which is exactly what SSoV analytics provides.
The Four Dimensions of Scientific Presence
A meaningful SSoV picture spans four interconnected areas, each one a window into a different aspect of your brand’s scientific footprint.
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Conference Presence
Medical congresses are where scientific narratives are built, challenged, and amplified. Your brand’s presence or absence at the events that matter most in your therapy area sends a clear signal to the scientific community. Conference share of voice in pharma isn’t just about sponsorship; it’s about whether the right voices are speaking to the right audiences on the topics that define your space.
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Publication Footprint
The body of scientific literature shapes clinical thinking over time. Understanding how your brand features within that broader conversation and how the sentiment around your therapy area compares to competitors is a powerful signal of where scientific credibility is being built and by whom.
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KOL Landscape
KOL influence measurement in pharma has moved well beyond counting publications. The most strategically valuable question is not simply who the key opinion leaders are — but where their influence is currently directed, and whether the voices shaping your therapy area’s scientific agenda are part of your story or someone else’s.
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Digital & Social Conversation
Scientific discourse no longer happens only in journals and on congress floors. Physicians, researchers, and advocates are increasingly shaping opinion in digital spaces. Understanding who is driving those conversations and what they are saying about your therapy area is a fast-emerging dimension of scientific engagement metrics in pharma that most teams are only beginning to map.
From Insight to Action
SSoV data is only as valuable as the decisions it enables. The most effective medical affairs teams use it to sharpen focus rather than expand activity, concentrating engagement where it will have the greatest scientific and strategic impact.
That might mean reallocating congress resources toward events where your brand is underrepresented but the conversation is most relevant. It might mean identifying KOLs who are highly influential in your space but not yet engaged. Or it might mean spotting a shift in publication sentiment early enough to adjust your scientific communications before it becomes a competitive disadvantage.
The common thread is moving from reactive to proactive — using a clear view of the scientific landscape to get ahead of trends rather than responding to them.
The Measurement Gap and Why It Matters Now
Despite growing recognition of its value, SSoV remains an underutilised metric in many organisations. Part of the challenge has been fragmentation: conference data in one place, publication databases in another, social listening in a third. Assembling a coherent view has historically required significant manual effort, making SSoV feel like a resource-intensive luxury rather than a practical tool.
That is changing. Medical affairs teams are accessing a unified view of their scientific share of voice across all relevant channels without the overhead of stitching together multiple data sources. konectar is enabling this kind of 360-degree SSoV visibility through its konectar SSoV report.
The result is that SSoV measurement is becoming accessible not just for global teams with large analytics functions, but for leaner medical affairs organisations that need sharp, actionable insights without the complexity.
Three Questions to Start the Conversation
If SSoV isn’t yet part of your medical affairs measurement framework, these three questions are a practical starting point:
- Where are we visible and where are we absent? A clear map of your brand’s current scientific presence often reveals gaps that activity metrics have been masking for years.
- Who is shaping the narrative in our therapy area and are they with us? Understanding the influence landscape, not just the KOL list, changes the strategic conversation entirely.
- How does our scientific footprint compare to competitors? Even a directional benchmark can surface vulnerabilities and opportunities that would otherwise remain invisible.
The Bottom Line
Scientific Share of Voice is not a vanity metric. It is a strategic lens that gives medical affairs teams a clearer, more honest view of where they stand in the scientific ecosystem and what it will take to strengthen that position.
As life sciences organisations continue to raise the bar on the value and credibility of medical affairs, the ability to measure and grow scientific share of voice will shift from a differentiator to a baseline expectation.
The teams that start building that capability today will be the ones setting the scientific agenda tomorrow.
