Dynamic patterns of academic forum activities
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.
- Publication:
-
Physica A Statistical Mechanics and its Applications
- Pub Date:
- November 2016
- DOI:
- 10.1016/j.physa.2016.05.033
- arXiv:
- arXiv:1505.08159
- Bibcode:
- 2016PhyA..461..117Z
- Keywords:
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- Human dynamics;
- Scaling law;
- Power law;
- Memory effect;
- Numerical model;
- Physics - Physics and Society;
- Computer Science - Social and Information Networks;
- Physics - Data Analysis;
- Statistics and Probability
- E-Print:
- 5 pages, 7 figures and 1 table