The Web of Human Sexual Contacts
Abstract
Many ``real-world'' networks are clearly defined while most ``social'' networks are to some extent subjective. Indeed, the accuracy of empirically-determined social networks is a question of some concern because individuals may have distinct perceptions of what constitutes a social link. One unambiguous type of connection is sexual contact. Here we analyze data on the sexual behavior of a random sample of individuals, and find that the cumulative distributions of the number of sexual partners during the twelve months prior to the survey decays as a power law with similar exponents for females and males. The scale-free nature of the web of human sexual contacts suggests that strategic interventions aimed at preventing the spread of sexually-transmitted diseases may be the most efficient approach.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.cond-mat/0106507,
title = {The Web of Human Sexual Contacts},
author = {Fredrik Liljeros and Christofer R. Edling and Luis A. Nunes Amaral and H. Eugene Stanley and Yvonne Aberg},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:cond-mat/0106507},
year = {2009}
}
Comments
7 pages with 2 eps figures. Latex file. For more details or for downloading the PDF file of the published article see http://polymer.bu.edu/~amaral/WebofContacts.html . For more results on teh structure of complex networks see http://polymer.bu.edu/~amaral/Networks.html