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Twenty years of network science

The idea that everyone in the world is connected to everyone else by just six degrees of separation was explained by the ‘small-world’ network model 20 years ago. What seemed to be a niche finding turned out to have huge consequences.
  1. Alessandro Vespignani

    1. Alessandro Vespignani is in the Network Science Institute and the Laboratory for the Modeling of Biological and Sociotechnical Systems, Northeastern University, Boston, Massachusetts 02115, USA.

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In 1998, Watts and Strogatz1 introduced the ‘small-world’ model of networks, which describes the clustering and short separations of nodes found in many real-life networks. I still vividly remember the discussion I had with fellow statistical physicists at the time: the model was seen as sort of interesting, but seemed to be merely an exotic departure from the regular, lattice-like network structures we were used to. But the more the paper was assimilated by scientists from different fields, the more it became clear that it had deep implications for our understanding of dynamic behaviour and phase transitions in real-world phenomena ranging from contagion processes to information diffusion. It soon became apparent that the paper had ushered in a new era of research that would lead to the establishment of network science as a multidisciplinary field.

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Nature 558, 528-529 (2018)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-018-05444-y

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