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Cited by 1,052

The DOI matches its Crossref record; 1 of the 1 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.

Identity and Search in Social Networks

Open access
Watts, Duncan J., Dodds, Peter Sheridan, Newman, M. E. J.·2002·Science

Abstract

Social networks have the surprising property of being “searchable”: Ordinary people are capable of directing messages through their network of acquaintances to reach a specific but distant target person in only a few steps. We present a model that offers an explanation of social network searchability in terms of recognizable personal identities: sets of characteristics measured along a number of social dimensions. Our model defines a class of searchable networks and a method for searching them that may be applicable to many network search problems, including the location of data files in peer-to-peer networks, pages on the World Wide Web, and information in distributed databases.

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Crossref · 10.1126/science.1070120

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Metadata

Authors
Watts, D. J., Dodds, P. S., & Newman, M. E. J.
Venue
Science
Published
2002-05-17
Volume
296
Issue
5571
Pages
1302-1305
ISSN
  • 0036-8075 (ISSN-L)
  • 1095-9203
OpenAlex
W2070497706
Cited by
1,052
References
1
FWCI
23.19
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
green

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CoChat. (2026). Citation check: Identity and Search in Social Networks. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.1126/science.1070120
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Watts, D. J., Dodds, P. S., & Newman, M. E. J. (2002). Identity and Search in Social Networks. Science. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1070120

Data sources

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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.