Exploring the community structure of a diabetes forum

A health forum is a kind of social network where users share information for specific topics they create. The purpose of this study was the identification of the key actors and the user communities in such a network. We used the publicly available data from a diabetes forum to create the corresponding network and explore several algorithms for the detection of user communities. The degree centrality of the network followed the power law distribution demonstrating that only a few users were the key actors in the forum. It was also shown that it is feasible to infer the top communities from a forum using certain algorithms; the key actors participated in these communities. Our approach could be applied to other health forums and be extended to examine additional aspects.