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Dynamic patterns of academic forum activities

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  • Zhao, Zhi-Dan
  • Gao, Ya-Chun
  • Cai, Shi-Min
  • Zhou, Tao

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.

Suggested Citation

  • Zhao, Zhi-Dan & Gao, Ya-Chun & Cai, Shi-Min & Zhou, Tao, 2016. "Dynamic patterns of academic forum activities," Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, Elsevier, vol. 461(C), pages 117-124.
    • Handle: RePEc:eee:phsmap:v:461:y:2016:i:c:p:117-124
    DOI: 10.1016/j.physa.2016.05.033
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    Citations

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    Cited by:

    1. Wang, Peng & Ma, Qiang, 2017. "From heavy-tailed to exponential distribution of interevent time in cellphone top-up behavior," Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, Elsevier, vol. 473(C), pages 10-17.
    2. Yue Yang & Changgui Gu & Qin Xiao & Huijie Yang, 2017. "Evolution of scaling behaviors embedded in sentence series from A Story of the Stone," PLOS ONE, Public Library of Science, vol. 12(2), pages 1-14, February.
    3. Nie, Wei-Peng & Cai, Shi-Min & Zhao, Zhi-Dan & Zhou, Tao, 2022. "Revealing mobility pattern of taxi movements with its travel trajectory," Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, Elsevier, vol. 598(C).
    4. Li, Ren-De & Liu, Jian-Guo & Guo, Qiang & Zhang, Yi-Cheng, 2018. "Social signature identification of dynamical social networks," Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, Elsevier, vol. 508(C), pages 213-222.
    5. Pan, Jun-Shan & Li, Yuan-Qi & Hu, Han-Ping & Hu, Yong, 2021. "Modeling collective behavior of posting microblogs by stochastic differential equation with jump," Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, Elsevier, vol. 578(C).
    6. Zhao, Zhi-Dan & Chen, Jiahao & Lu, Yichuan & Zhao, Na & Jiang, Dazhi & Wang, Bing-Hong, 2021. "Dynamic patterns of open review process," Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, Elsevier, vol. 582(C).
    7. Li, Ze-Tao & Nie, Wei-Peng & Cai, Shi-Min & Zhao, Zhi-Dan & Zhou, Tao, 2023. "Exploring the topological characteristics of urban trip networks based on taxi trajectory data," Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, Elsevier, vol. 609(C).

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