3,201 research outputs found
Quantifying the interdisciplinarity of scientific journals and fields
There is an overall perception of increased interdisciplinarity in science,
but this is difficult to confirm quantitatively owing to the lack of adequate
methods to evaluate subjective phenomena. This is no different from the
difficulties in establishing quantitative relationships in human and social
sciences. In this paper we quantified the interdisciplinarity of scientific
journals and science fields by using an entropy measurement based on the
diversity of the subject categories of journals citing a specific journal. The
methodology consisted in building citation networks using the Journal Citation
Reports database, in which the nodes were journals and edges were established
based on citations among journals. The overall network for the 11-year period
(1999-2009) studied was small-world and scale free with regard to the
in-strength. Upon visualizing the network topology an overall structure of the
various science fields could be inferred, especially their interconnections. We
confirmed quantitatively that science fields are becoming increasingly
interdisciplinary, with the degree of interdisplinarity (i.e. entropy)
correlating strongly with the in-strength of journals and with the impact
factor.Comment: 23 pages, 6 figure
Fragmenting networks by targeting collective influencers at a mesoscopic level
A practical approach to protecting networks against epidemic processes such
as spreading of infectious diseases, malware, and harmful viral information is
to remove some influential nodes beforehand to fragment the network into small
components. Because determining the optimal order to remove nodes is a
computationally hard problem, various approximate algorithms have been proposed
to efficiently fragment networks by sequential node removal. Morone and Makse
proposed an algorithm employing the non-backtracking matrix of given networks,
which outperforms various existing algorithms. In fact, many empirical networks
have community structure, compromising the assumption of local tree-like
structure on which the original algorithm is based. We develop an immunization
algorithm by synergistically combining the Morone-Makse algorithm and coarse
graining of the network in which we regard a community as a supernode. In this
way, we aim to identify nodes that connect different communities at a
reasonable computational cost. The proposed algorithm works more efficiently
than the Morone-Makse and other algorithms on networks with community
structure.Comment: 5 figures, 3 tables, and SI include
Interbank markets and multiplex networks: centrality measures and statistical null models
The interbank market is considered one of the most important channels of
contagion. Its network representation, where banks and claims/obligations are
represented by nodes and links (respectively), has received a lot of attention
in the recent theoretical and empirical literature, for assessing systemic risk
and identifying systematically important financial institutions. Different
types of links, for example in terms of maturity and collateralization of the
claim/obligation, can be established between financial institutions. Therefore
a natural representation of the interbank structure which takes into account
more features of the market, is a multiplex, where each layer is associated
with a type of link. In this paper we review the empirical structure of the
multiplex and the theoretical consequences of this representation. We also
investigate the betweenness and eigenvector centrality of a bank in the
network, comparing its centrality properties across different layers and with
Maximum Entropy null models.Comment: To appear in the book "Interconnected Networks", A. Garas e F.
Schweitzer (eds.), Springer Complexity Serie
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