Figure 2. Comparison of level of acceptance and rejection of stakeholder comments
Figure 3 compares stakeholder scores on different types of guidelines over the years as a heatmap, to avoid aggregating the data too much and showing trends against different parameter (year, stakeholder type, guideline class). The closer to 2, the higher the acceptance level and the darker the green colour. A mean score close to 0, indicated by a darker red colour, indicates a higher rejection level. Overall, academic stakeholders have highest likelihood for acceptance in both indication-level and general guidelines. Surprisingly, governmental stakeholders had highest chances for acceptance for guidelines on molecule-level. Yet, the trend shows that government comments had good acceptance for general guidelines and the exceptionally low score in 2014 (a result of multiple guidelines with no accepted comments, i.e. mean score 0) impacts the overall average score disproportionally. Trade association and individual company comments are most likely to be accepted for indication-level guidelines (mean score 1.01 and 1.12). Comments from individual companies also were more likely to be accepted for molecule-level guidelines than those from trade associations (mean scores 1.01 vs 0.80), while comments from trade associations were more likely to be accepted for general guidelines (mean scores 0.92 vs 0.80).