ReviewPhilosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences2015
How mathematical epidemiology became a field of biology: a commentary on Anderson and May (1981) 'The population dynamics of microparasites and their invertebrate hosts'.
Review in Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences, 2015. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 82 papers.
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
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Who cites it
82 citing papers in PubMed.
- Article
- Multiple Key Hosts and Network Structure Shape Viral Prevalence Across Multispecies Communities of Bees.Ecology letters · 2026Article
- The effects of spatial structure on a host-parasite model with horizontal and vertical transmission.Theoretical ecology · 2026Article
- Experimental evolution of Plasmodium yoelii in single and helminth-coinfected mice.Malaria journal · 2025Article
- Parasite responses to resource provisioning can be altered by within-host co-infection interactions.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2025Article
- Host-Microbiome Interactions as Moderators of Host Quality and Biodiversity-Disease Relationships.Integrative and comparative biology · 2025Review
- Boom-Bust Cycles Constrain Host-Parasite Dynamics, Suppress Parasite Spread, and Drive Parasites Extinct.The American naturalist · 2025Article
- Local floral resources and edge density within the urban ecosystem promote larger and less variable body size in the great banded furrow bee, Halictus scabiosae.BMC ecology and evolution · 2025Article
- Impacts of Selective Predation on Infection Prevalence and Host Susceptibility.Ecology and evolution · 2025Article
- Abundance-mediated species interactions.Ecology · 2025Article
- Increasing environmental fluctuations can dampen variability of endogenously cycling populations.Royal Society open science · 2024Article
- Article
- Positive feedback loops exacerbate the influence of superspreaders in disease transmission.iScience · 2023Article
- Parasite-mediated selection on host phenology.Ecology and evolution · 2023Article
- The Dissemination ofJournal of fungi (Basel, Switzerland) · 2023Article
- How do fluctuating ecological dynamics impact the evolution of hosts and parasites?Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2023Review
- Article
- Diagnosis of helminths depends on worm fecundity and the distribution of parasites within hosts.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2023Article
- Crayfish population size under different routes of pathogen transmission.Ecology and evolution · 2023Article
- Why the Spectral Radius? An intuition-building introduction to the basic reproduction number.Bulletin of mathematical biology · 2022Article
22 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
2 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
We discuss the context, content and importance of the paper 'The population dynamics of microparasites and their invertebrate hosts', by R. M. Anderson and R. M. May, published in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society as a stand-alone issue in 1981. We do this from the broader perspective of the study of infectious disease dynamics, rather than the specific perspective of the dynamics of insect pathogens. We argue that their 1981 paper fits seamlessly in the systematic study of infectious disease dynamics that was initiated by the authors in 1978, combining effective use of simple mathematical models, firmly rooted in biology, with observable or empirically measurable ingredients and quantities, and promoting extensive capacity building. This systematic approach, taking ecology and biology rather than applied mathematics as the motivation for advance, proved essential for the maturation of the field, and culminated in their landmark textbook of 1991. This commentary was written to celebrate the 350th anniversary of the journal Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society.
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Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.