Skip to main page content
U.S. flag

An official website of the United States government

Dot gov

The .gov means it’s official.
Federal government websites often end in .gov or .mil. Before sharing sensitive information, make sure you’re on a federal government site.

Https

The site is secure.
The https:// ensures that you are connecting to the official website and that any information you provide is encrypted and transmitted securely.

Access keys NCBI Homepage MyNCBI Homepage Main Content Main Navigation
. 1998 Jun 4;393(6684):440-2.
doi: 10.1038/30918.

Collective dynamics of 'small-world' networks

D J Watts  1 , S H Strogatz
Affiliations

Collective dynamics of 'small-world' networks

D J Watts et al. Nature. .

Abstract

Networks of coupled dynamical systems have been used to model biological oscillators, Josephson junction arrays, excitable media, neural networks, spatial games, genetic control networks and many other self-organizing systems. Ordinarily, the connection topology is assumed to be either completely regular or completely random. But many biological, technological and social networks lie somewhere between these two extremes. Here we explore simple models of networks that can be tuned through this middle ground: regular networks 'rewired' to introduce increasing amounts of disorder. We find that these systems can be highly clustered, like regular lattices, yet have small characteristic path lengths, like random graphs. We call them 'small-world' networks, by analogy with the small-world phenomenon (popularly known as six degrees of separation. The neural network of the worm Caenorhabditis elegans, the power grid of the western United States, and the collaboration graph of film actors are shown to be small-world networks. Models of dynamical systems with small-world coupling display enhanced signal-propagation speed, computational power, and synchronizability. In particular, infectious diseases spread more easily in small-world networks than in regular lattices.

PubMed Disclaimer

Comment in

  • It's a small world.
    Collins JJ, Chow CC. Collins JJ, et al. Nature. 1998 Jun 4;393(6684):409-10. doi: 10.1038/30835. Nature. 1998. PMID: 9623993 No abstract available.
  • Twenty years of network science.
    Vespignani A. Vespignani A. Nature. 2018 Jun;558(7711):528-529. doi: 10.1038/d41586-018-05444-y. Nature. 2018. PMID: 29941900 No abstract available.

Similar articles

See all similar articles

Cited by

See all "Cited by" articles

Publication types

-