ABSTRACT
For decades, it has been believed by default that the components, such as cells, societies, and even networks, of network systems are connected together by chance. In the past 10 years, the advance in research, which has appeared as overwhelming as an avalanche in the scientific area of complex networks, indicates that many realistic network systems can be investigated by using and abstracting into similar mathematical structures without specifying the relevant ages, functionalities, scales, and other characteristics of the components. Such theoretical generality allows researchers from different fields to employ a unified framework to investigate their respective networks. The concept of scale-free networks, developed 10 years ago, is one of the several important events that have helped in catalyzing the appearance of the network science, a new field of study that has been full of challenges and advances.
