🏯 About Market Banzuke

Market Banzuke is a free tool that combines the academic literature database OpenAlex (~400 million papers) with AI (gpt-5) to automatically visualize vendor-level paper presence (research visibility) and Key Opinion Leaders (KOLs) in any specific field. It aggregates manufacturer, instrument, and product names mentioned in academic papers across pharma, biotech, scientific instruments, and materials, displaying them as pie charts, ranking tables (banzuke), and researcher network graphs.

What this tool can analyze ✅

• Paper-based vendor presence: which vendor names appear most in papers (= mention frequency in literature)
• Research presence: researchers actively publishing in each field (= KOL candidates)
• Co-authorship networks: collaboration relationships and affiliations between researchers
• Geographic distribution: country-level paper count map (where activity is concentrated)
• Field-specific strength: trends like "Vendor A leads in lipidomics, Vendor B leads in proteomics"

What this tool cannot analyze ⚠️

• Sales / market share / installed base: paper mention frequency and actual sales/units are different things
• Active equipment status: papers continue mentioning legacy models, so old equipment may be overrepresented
• Asian / emerging market reality: mostly English-language papers are covered, so contributions from communities publishing only in Chinese / Japanese / etc. are underrepresented
• Non-published applications: clinical routine, quality control, and factory operations are invisible since they aren't published
• New vendor entries: even new products take years to appear in literature
• Current researcher affiliations: based on past papers, so researchers who have changed jobs or retired may still be listed

How to read the results 📖

Market Banzuke's output represents "academic community presence", not sales-based market share. Use the results in the following way:

• High paper exposure ≠ top in sales. Think of it as "products researchers cite often" = "adopted by academia"
• Use it as a starting point for competitive analysis, then combine with field sales intel and IR information
• Use it for hypothesis generation for KOL candidates — verify research background before approaching them
• Use it to screen which companies/researchers are active in new or adjacent fields

How it works (technical pipeline) ⚙️

Researcher banzuke score (hybrid)

The banzuke ranking (balanced metric) uses the following weights:

• h-index (career-wide impact): 30%
• Citation rate (impact in this specific field): 30%
• Citation count (cumulative influence): 30%
• Paper count (activity in this field): 10%

Each metric is rank-normalized to 0–1 and weighted-averaged.

Privacy and reliability 🔒

This tool is intended for PoC, internal research, and aggregation of public information. It performs external processing via the OpenAI API. If you require communication confidentiality, host your own proxy and provide your own OpenAI API key.

Data sources 📚

• OpenAlex — open academic literature database (~400M records, CC0 license)
• OpenAI API — gpt-5 family of language models (search query generation, paper classification, signature extraction)

FAQ ❓

Q. Can it detect manufacturers that don't appear in papers?

A. No. Manufacturers and products that don't appear in academic papers (e.g., consumer goods, military equipment, devices used only in field operations) are outside this tool's scope. Other data sources (patents, trade publications, IR information) require separate research.

Q. Why "presence" instead of "share"?

A. The phrase "market share" usually refers to actual sales- or unit-based reality. What this tool produces is paper mention frequency, which is different from sales, so we use terms like "paper presence", "research visibility", and "academic presence" to avoid confusion.

Q. Why the "banzuke" (sumo ranking) style?

A. The sumo banzuke is ideal for showing East/West contrasts (e.g., country vs. country, vendor vs. vendor) and hierarchy (Yokozuna, Ozeki, Sekiwake, Komusubi, Maegashira) at a glance. We bring cultural identity to a cold ranking structure to make it more approachable.

Q. Is this tool free?

A. Yes — the host provides the AI API key, so users can use it for free. However, there are some constraints:

• Mass usage or crawling may trigger access restrictions
• You can also enter your own API key for heavy usage or confidential investigations

Disclaimer 📜

The analysis results from Market Banzuke are reference information. Do not use them as the final basis for investment, business, hiring, or legal decisions. We do not guarantee the accuracy, completeness, or timeliness of the information provided by this tool. Users should cross-reference with other information sources at their own discretion.