Hierarchical organization in complex networks

Many real networks in nature and society share two generic properties: they are scale-free and they display a high degree of clustering. We show that these two features are the consequence of a hierarchical organization, implying that small groups of nodes organize in a hierarchical manner into increasingly large groups, while maintaining a scale-free topology. In hierarchical networks, the degree of clustering characterizing the different groups follows a strict scaling law, which can be used to identify the presence of a hierarchical organization in real networks. We find that several real networks, such as the Worldwideweb, actor network, the Internet at the domain level, and the semantic web obey this…