Epidemics and Rumors
1964
Goffman and Newill directed attention to the analogy between the spreading of an infectious disease and the dissemination of information. This article examines the spreading of a rumor from the point of view of mathematical epidemiology and briefly reports on work to be published in detail elsewhere.
Authors emphasize that a mathematical model for the spreading of rumors can be constructed in a number of different ways, depending on the mechanism postulated to describe the growth and decay of the actual spreading process. In all these models, the mathematical techniques familiar in mathematical epidemiology can be applied, but even the qualitative results so obtained need not necessarily be as expected on the basis of the formal analogy with epidemics.
This description was extracted from the publication abstract.
Source:
Daley DJ, Kendall DG. Epidemics and Rumours. Nature 1964; 204. https://doi.org/10.1038/2041118a0