Abstract
New J. Phys. 9 181 (2007) Evolving out-of-equilibrium networks have been under intense scrutiny
recently. In many real-world settings the number of links added per new node is
not constant but depends on the time at which the node is introduced in the
system. This simple idea gives rise to the concept of accelerating networks,
for which we review an existing definition and -- after finding it somewhat
constrictive -- offer a new definition. The new definition provided here views
network acceleration as a time dependent property of a given system, as opposed
to being a property of the specific algorithm applied to grow the network. The
defnition also covers both unweighted and weighted networks. As time-stamped
network data becomes increasingly available, the proposed measures may be
easily carried out on empirical datasets. As a simple case study we apply the
concepts to study the evolution of three different instances of Wikipedia,
namely, those in English, German, and Japanese, and find that the networks
undergo different acceleration regimes in their evolution.
