Introduction
This site is an online appendix to the paper "Pick your poison: pricing and inventories at unlicensed online pharmacies [1]."
It contains links to and a brief description of the 4 data files we used for the analysis of prices and inventories. Specifically, the association is as follows:
Each data file has an identical format, and the data is structured as a sequence of comma separated values (CSV). Εach line represents a single drug, in addition to the domain name of the pharmacy or market it was available at the time of our measurements. The first line of each data file is a header that characterizes the type of data that follow (i.e. columns):
- ingredient → The primary active ingredient of the drug as identified through the RXNorm database
- used_name → The advertised name of the drug
- modifier → Brand or generic
- dosage_num → The advertised amount of active ingredient in the drug (numeric)
- dosage_unit_name → The unit used to characterize the amount of active ingredient (e.g. mg, mcg, ml)
- unit_num → The number of doses contained (numeric)
- unit_name → The name characterizing the type of unit (e.g. pill, bottle)
- collection_date → The unix timestamp the date this entry was collected. Available only for the primary set of 256 unlicensed pharmacies. For the other datasets the value is always NA
- domain → The domain name of the marketplace. For Silk Road the value is always sr.
- price → The advertised price of the specific drug (numeric)
- currency → The currency associated with the advertised price (e.g. dollar, pound)
- price_in_usd → The equivalent price in US dollars. For the conversion (whenever needed) we used associated 1-year average exchange rate
- schedule → For scheduled drugs, the available values are 1 to 5 in their latin number equivalent (e.g. IV. For non-scheduled drugs the value is N
- narc → Y if the drug is a narcotic; N otherwise
Citing
The data made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License. If you use any of this dataset, please cite the associated paper:
[1] N. Leontiadis, T. Moore, and N. Christin, "Pick your poison: pricing and inventories at unlicensed online pharmacies", in Proceedings of the 14th ACM conference on Electronic Commerce, ser. EC ’13. Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA. ACM, 2013.
