Preferential attachment is a concept that has been used to describe the development and distribution of a variety of biological and social phenomena, including the distribution of species among genera, the distribution of numbers of papers published by scientists, the distribution of wealth among individuals, and, more recently, the growth and structure of networks. Preferential attachment is the description of a process wherein some characteristic or thing is distributed in a random or quasi-random fashion among people, according to how much of this characteristic or thing an individual already has. [Source: Encyclopedia of Social Networks; Preferential Attachment]
preferential attachment
social network analysis
concepts