The Transition Towards Immortality: Non-linear Autocatalytic Growth of Citations to Scientific Papers

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...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Journal of statistical physics 2013-04, Vol.151 (1-2), p.340-354
Main Authors: Golosovsky, Michael, Solomon, Sorin
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Mathematical and Computational Physics
Physical Chemistry
Physics
Physics and Astronomy
Quantum Physics
Statistical Physics and Dynamical Systems
Theoretical
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Summary: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.
ISSN:0022-4715
1572-9613
DOI:10.1007/s10955-013-0714-z