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Cited by 455

The DOI matches its Crossref record; 25 of the 25 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.

Winners don't take all: Characterizing the competition for links on the web

Open access
Pennock, David M., Flake, Gary W., Lawrence, Steve, Glover, Eric J., Giles, C. Lee·2002·Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences

Abstract

As a whole, the World Wide Web displays a striking “rich get richer” behavior, with a relatively small number of sites receiving a disproportionately large share of hyperlink references and traffic. However, hidden in this skewed global distribution, we discover a qualitatively different and considerably less biased link distribution among subcategories of pages—for example, among all university homepages or all newspaper homepages. Although the connectivity distribution over the entire web is close to a pure power law, we find that the distribution within specific categories is typically unimodal on a log scale, with the location of the mode, and thus the extent of the rich get richer phenomenon, varying across different categories. Similar distributions occur in many other naturally occurring networks, including research paper citations, movie actor collaborations, and United States power grid connections. A simple generative model, incorporating a mixture of preferential and uniform attachment, quantifies the degree to which the rich nodes grow richer, and how new (and poorly connected) nodes can compete. The model accurately accounts for the true connectivity distributions of category-specific web pages, the web as a whole, and other social networks.

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Metadata

Authors
Pennock, D. M., Flake, G. W., Lawrence, S., Glover, E. J., & Giles, C. L.
Venue
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
Published
2002-04-16
Volume
99
Issue
8
Pages
5207-5211
ISSN
  • 0027-8424 (ISSN-L)
  • 1091-6490
OpenAlex
W2118009636
Cited by
455
References
25
FWCI
19.43
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
green

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CoChat. (2026). Citation check: Winners don't take all: Characterizing the competition for links on the web. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.1073/pnas.032085699
The paper
Pennock, D. M., Flake, G. W., Lawrence, S., Glover, E. J., & Giles, C. L. (2002). Winners don't take all: Characterizing the competition for links on the web. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.032085699

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Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).

Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.