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

Michael Golosovsky*, Sorin Solomon

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

15 Scopus citations

Abstract

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.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)340-354
Number of pages15
JournalJournal of Statistical Physics
Volume151
Issue number1-2
DOIs
StatePublished - Apr 2013

Keywords

  • Autocatalytic growth
  • Citations
  • Complex networks
  • Power-law distribution
  • Preferential attachment

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