An Experimental Study of the Small World Problem

By Jeffrey B. Travers, S. Milgram. 1969

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In Social Sciences & Humanities

Citations in the corpus

Community detection in graphs (2009, background): “The first evidence that social networks are characterized by paths of small length was provided by a series of famous experiments conducted by the phychologist Stanley Milgram (Milgram, 1967; Travers and Milgram, 1969).”
Random Dot Product Graph Models for Social Networks (2007, background): “Also, given that the result that reinvigorated the study of social networks was Milgram’s experimental result on the navigability of the “real world” social network, [25,26], it is reasonable to consider under what conditions short paths can be found in G(W, n).”
Planetary-scale views on a large instant-messaging network (2008, background): “Wefocused on analyzinghigh-level characteristics andpatternsthat emerge from the collective dynamics of 240 million people, rather than the actions and characteristics of individuals.”
Social network analysis: developments, advances, and prospects (2010, background): “In 1998, Duncan Watts and Steven Strogatz published a paper (Watts and Strogatz 1998) that revisited some of the ideas on random networks that had grown out of Stanley Milgram's work on 'small worlds' (Milgram 1967; Travers and Milgram 1969).”
The “New” Science of Networks (2004, methodology): “…(1998) coined the term 1 Throughout this paper, the term “lattice” is used in the physicist’s sense of a crystal lattice (roughly, a low-dimensional grid), not the mathematician’s sense of a partial ordering on Milgram and colleagues (Korte & Milgram 1970; Milgram 1967; Travers & Milgram 1969).”
Self-Organized Public-Key Management for Mobile Ad Hoc Networks (2003, background): “In that work, we showed that the PGP certificate graph exhibits the small-world phenomenon [25], [26], [27] (i.e., this graph has 1) a small average shortest path length that scales logarithmically with its size and 2) clustered vertices).”
Network resilience (2020, background): “The phenomenon of small-world was first discovered in a letter-delivering experiment [591, 592], where the distance between two people in the world was found to”
The structure of information pathways in a social communication network (2008, methodology): “…communication latency, strength of weak ties This research was supported in part by the Institute for Social and Economic Research and Policy at Columbia University, the Institute for the Social Sciences at Cornell University, the James S. McDonnell Foundation, the John D. and Catherine T.…”
Agent-based simulation of innovation diffusion: a review (2011, background): “, the largest number of links on the shortest path between any two nodes is small, which is a characteristic the generated graphs share with most real-world social networks (Travers and Milgram 1969).”
Do the Young Live in a "Smaller World" Than the Old? Age-Specific Degrees of Separation in a Large-Scale Mobile Communication Network (2016, result): “This “small world phenomenon” was first documented in a series of classic experiments conducted by Travers and Milgram in the 1960s [28, 37].”
Organizational network perceptions versus reality: A small world after all? ☆ (2008, background): “…and Boston were each asked to mail a folder directly to a ‘‘target” person if they knew this Boston-area stockbroker personally; or, if they did not know the target personally, to mail the folder to a personal acquaintance who would be more likely to know the target (Travers & Milgram, 1969).”
The analysis of social networks (2008, background): “2.2 Network study designs Though a few network experiments have been conducted (e.g., Friedkin and Cook 1990; Travers and Milgram 1969), most social network data are observational.”