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The web of human sexual contacts

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

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Figure 1: It's a small world: social networks have small average path lengths between connections and show a large degree of clustering.
Figure 2: Scale-free distribution of the number of sexual partners for females and males.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Sociology, Stockholm University, Stockholm, S-106 91, Sweden

    Fredrik Liljeros, Christofer R. Edling & Yvonne Åberg

  2. Center for Polymer Studies and Department of Physics, Boston University, Boston, 02215, Massachusetts, USA

    Luís A. Nunes Amaral & H. Eugene Stanley

Authors
  1. Fredrik Liljeros
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  2. Christofer R. Edling
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  3. Luís A. Nunes Amaral
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  4. H. Eugene Stanley
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  5. Yvonne Åberg
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Correspondence to Fredrik Liljeros.

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Liljeros, F., Edling, C., Amaral, L. et al. The web of human sexual contacts. Nature 411, 907–908 (2001). https://doi.org/10.1038/35082140

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