TY - JOUR
T1 - The Transition Towards Immortality
T2 - Non-linear Autocatalytic Growth of Citations to Scientific Papers
AU - Golosovsky, Michael
AU - Solomon, Sorin
PY - 2013/4
Y1 - 2013/4
N2 - 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.
AB - 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.
KW - Autocatalytic growth
KW - Citations
KW - Complex networks
KW - Power-law distribution
KW - Preferential attachment
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=84875624454&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1007/s10955-013-0714-z
DO - 10.1007/s10955-013-0714-z
M3 - ???researchoutput.researchoutputtypes.contributiontojournal.article???
AN - SCOPUS:84875624454
SN - 0022-4715
VL - 151
SP - 340
EP - 354
JO - Journal of Statistical Physics
JF - Journal of Statistical Physics
IS - 1-2
ER -