Price's model

Price's model (named after the physicist Derek J. de Solla Price) is a mathematical model for the growth of citation networks.^[1][2] It was the first model which generalized the Simon model^[3] to be used for networks, especially for growing networks. Price's model belongs to the broader class of network growing models (together with the Barabási–Albert model) whose primary target is to explain the origination of networks with strongly skewed degree distributions. The model picked up the ideas of the Simon model reflecting the concept of rich get richer, also known as the Matthew effect. Price took the example of a network of citations between scientific papers and expressed its properties. His idea was that the way an old vertex (existing paper) gets new edges (new citations) should be proportional to the number of existing edges (existing citations) the vertex already has. This was referred to as cumulative advantage, now also known as preferential attachment. Price's work is also significant in providing the first known example of a scale-free network (although this term was introduced later). His ideas were used to describe many real-world networks such as the Web.