rather than randomly connecting to the network. Preferential attachment makes intuitive sense in many situations (consider the first-publisher advantage in citation networks (de Solla Price, 1965; Newman, 2009)), and indeed variants of this model appears to generally capture the behavior of several real-world networks (Barabasi and Albert, 1999; Price, 1976). This line of research also led to the realization that the presence and frequency of hubs has strong implications for network integrity under attack (Albert et al., 2000), a finding with clear relevance to epidemiologists, the military, and neurologists.
