Epidemic models for research ideas spreading in the scientific community

We apply the basic SIR model and some of its extended versions to the propagation of scientific ideas in the community of researchers, in order to investigate the spread of those ideas. To this end, we collected quantitative records of articles published in scientific conferences for some selected topics over a 5 year period. The values of the basic reproductive ratio are discussed to compile classification based on the contagion level and the description given by the models are investigated.