Access

Brief Communications

Nature 411, 907-908 (21 June 2001) | doi:10.1038/35082140

The web of human sexual contacts

Fredrik Liljeros1, Christofer R. Edling1, Luís A. Nunes Amaral2, H. Eugene Stanley2 & Yvonne Åberg1

Top

Promiscuous individuals are the vulnerable nodes to target in safe-sex campaigns.

Unlike clearly defined 'real-world' networks1, social networks tend to be subjective to some extent2, 3 because the perception of what constitutes a social link may differ between individuals. One unambiguous type of connection, however, is sexual contact, and here we analyse the sexual behaviour of a random sample of individuals4 to reveal the mathematical features of a sexual-contact network.