A data-driven analysis to question epidemic models for citation cascades on the blogosphere

TL;DR

This study critically examines citation cascades in the blogosphere, revealing that their structure and content do not support the common epidemic spreading interpretation, and suggesting alternative explanations based on blogger behavior.

Contribution

It challenges the epidemic model of citation cascades by combining structural and semantic analyses, proposing that blogger behavior explains cascade features better.

Findings

Citation cascades share features with epidemic models.

Content analysis shows epidemic interpretation is misleading.

A simple behavioral model explains cascade statistics.

Abstract

Citation cascades in blog networks are often considered as traces of information spreading on this social medium. In this work, we question this point of view using both a structural and semantic analysis of five months activity of the most representative blogs of the french-speaking community.Statistical measures reveal that our dataset shares many features with those that can be found in the literature, suggesting the existence of an identical underlying process. However, a closer analysis of the post content indicates that the popular epidemic-like descriptions of cascades are misleading in this context.A basic model, taking only into account the behavior of bloggers and their restricted social network, accounts for several important statistical features of the data.These arguments support the idea that citations primary goal may not be information spreading on the blogosphere.