Woo, Jiyoung, and Hsinchun Chen. "An event-driven SIR model for topic diffusion in web forums." 2012 IEEE International Conference on Intelligence and Security Informatics. IEEE, 2012.

This research explores how information spreads in web forums by modeling topic-level diffusion using the SIR (Susceptible, Infective, Recovered) epidemic model. An event-driven SIR model is proposed to account for the impact of news postings on information diffusion. The study evaluates these models with a large dataset from a major company's web forum, finding that the event-SIR model better captures the peaks in user participation on major topics.