Dynamic patterns of academic forum activities

Zhi-Dan Zhao, Ya-Chun Gao, Shi-Min Cai and Tao Zhou

Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, 2016, vol. 461, issue C, 117-124

Abstract: A mass of traces of human activities show rich dynamic patterns. In this article, we comprehensively investigate the dynamic patterns of 50 thousands of researchers’ activities in Sciencenet, the largest multi-disciplinary academic community in China. Through statistical analyses, we found that (i) there exists a power-law scaling between the frequency of visits to an academic forum and the number of corresponding visitors, with the exponent being about 1.33; (ii) the expansion process of academic forums obeys the Heaps’ law, namely the number of distinct visited forums to the number of visits grows in a power-law form with exponent being about 0.54; (iii) the probability distributions of time intervals and the number of visits taken to revisit the same academic forum both follow power-laws, indicating the existence of memory effect in academic forum activities. On the basis of these empirical results, we propose a dynamic model that incorporates the exploration, preferential return with memory effect, which can well reproduce the observed scaling laws.

Keywords: Human dynamics; Scaling law; Power law; Memory effect; Numerical model (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2016
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (7)

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:phsmap:v:461:y:2016:i:c:p:117-124

DOI: 10.1016/j.physa.2016.05.033

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