2013/02/12 by Michael Golosovsky, Sorin Solomon · 2 citations
Computer Science · Physics and Astronomy · #Autocatalysis #Autocatalytic reaction #Citation #Complex Network Analysis Techniques #Dynamical systems theory #Nonlinear dynamical systems #Nonlinear system #Origins and Evolution of Life #Phase transition #Theoretical and Computational Physics #cond-mat.stat-mech #cs.DL #physics.soc-ph
paper · pdf · doi:10.1007/s10955-013-0714-z
to appear soon in the Special issue of the Journal of Statistical Physics
arxiv created 2013/02/12 · openalex publication_date 2013/02/25 · arxiv updated 2013/03/19 · openalex created_date 2016/06/24 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/05
We discuss microscopic mechanisms of complex network growth, with the special emphasis of how these mechanisms can be evaluated from the measurements on real networks. As an example we consider the network of citations to scientific papers. Contrary to common belief that its growth is determined by the linear preferential attachment, our microscopic measurements show that it is driven by the nonlinear autocatalytic growth. This invalidates the scale-free hypothesis for the citation network. The nonlinearity is responsible for a dramatic dynamical phase transition: while the citation lifetime of majority of papers is 6-10 years, the highly-cited papers have practically infinite lifetime.