Scientific journals are the repositories of the gradually accumulating knowledge of mankind about the world surrounding us. Just as our knowledge is organised into classes ranging from major disciplines, subjects and fields to increasingly specific t
opics, journals can also be categorised into groups using various metrics. In addition to the set of topics characteristic for a journal, they can also be ranked regarding their relevance from the point of overall influence. One widespread measure is impact factor, but in the present paper we intend to reconstruct a much more detailed description by studying the hierarchical relations between the journals based on citation data. We use a measure related to the notion of m-reaching centrality and find a network which shows the level of influence of a journal from the point of the direction and efficiency with which information spreads through the network. We can also obtain an alternative network using a suitably modified nested hierarchy extraction method applied to the same data. The results are weakly methodology-dependent and reveal non-trivial relations among journals. The two alternative hierarchies show large similarity with some striking differences, providing together a complex picture of the intricate relations between scientific journals.
We show that the recently introduced label propagation method for detecting communities in complex networks is equivalent to find the local minima of a simple Potts model. Applying to empirical data, the number of such local minima was found to be ve
ry high, much larger than the number of nodes in the graph. The aggregation method for combining information from more local minima shows a tendency to fragment the communities into very small pieces.
We consider a system hierarchically modular, if besides its hierarchical structure it shows a sequence of scale separations from the point of view of some functionality or property. Starting from regular, deterministic objects like the Vicsek snowfla
ke or the deterministic scale free network by Ravasz et al. we first characterize the hierarchical modularity by the periodicity of some properties on a logarithmic scale indicating separation of scales. Then we introduce randomness by keeping the scale freeness and other important characteristics of the objects and monitor the changes in the modularity. In the presented examples sufficient amount of randomness destroys hierarchical modularity. Our findings suggest that the experimentally observed hierarchical modularity in systems with algebraically decaying clustering coefficients indicates a limited level of randomness.
