Roger Guimera
Adjunct Professor
Chemical Engineering
Av. Paisos Catalans 26
Tarragona, Catalonia E-43007, Spain
Chemical & Biological Engineering
2145 Sheridan Road (Room E136)
Evanston, IL 60208, US
Self-similar community structure in a network of human interactions
Phys. Rev. E 68, art. no. 065103 (2003)
Times cited: 244
Abstract
We propose a procedure for analyzing and characterizing complex networks. We apply this to the social network as constructed from email communications within a medium sized university with about 1700 employees. Email networks provide an accurate and nonintrusive description of the flow of information within human organizations. Our results reveal the self-organization of the network into a state where the distribution of community sizes is self-similar. This suggests that a universal mechanism, responsible for emergence of scaling in other self-organized complex systems, as, for instance, river networks, could also be the underlying driving force in the formation and evolution of social networks.