ArticleScientific reports2019
Node centrality measures are a poor substitute for causal inference.
Article in Scientific reports, 2019. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 68 papers.
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Who cites it
68 citing papers in PubMed.
- Psychological Network of Stress, Coping and Social Support in an Aboriginal Population.International journal of environmental research and public health · 2022Trial
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- Post-Pandemic Differences in Symptom Networks and Personality Associations Among College Students: A Repeated Cross-Sectional Study.Behavioral sciences (Basel, Switzerland) · 2026Article
- Grade-specific associations between insomnia and depressive symptoms in adolescents: a cross-lagged panel network analysis.Child and adolescent psychiatry and mental health · 2026Article
- Structure and temporal stability of adolescent psychotic experiences: findings from a German longitudinal cohort study.Psychological medicine · 2026Article
- Family external social support as a bridge to humanistic care: a cross-sectional network analysis with exploratory gender comparison in college students.BMC psychology · 2026Article
- System-level clustering of testosterone-related biomarkers identifies high-risk aging profiles linked to inflammation and renal function.Communications medicine · 2026Article
- Network psychometrics in practice: A practical framework for designing empirical studies that utilize a psychological network approach.Behavior research methods · 2026Article
- A network analysis of ICD-11 complex posttraumatic stress disorder symptoms in Danish treatment-seeking military veterans.BMC psychiatry · 2026Article
- Discovery of suicide risk-associated predictors among emerging adults: an interpretable machine learning and network analysis approach.BMC psychiatry · 2026Article
- Article
- Longitudinal network dynamics of cardiometabolic, mobility, and psychological indicators among older adults in rural South Africa.Innovation in aging · 2026Article
- Component- and dimension-level network associations between sleep quality and health-related quality of life in older adults with hypertension.Frontiers in public health · 2026Article
- Longitudinal dynamics of symptom networks in patients with differentiated thyroid cancer undergoing radioactive iodine therapy: a prospective cohort study.Frontiers in oncology · 2026Article
- A Latent profile and network intervention analysis of psychosomatic symptoms in lung cancer immunotherapy patients.PloS one · 2026Article
- A Psychometric Network Analysis of Fear of Progression, Coping Styles, and Self-Management Among Patients Undergoing Continuous Ambulatory Peritoneal Dialysis.Psychology research and behavior management · 2026Article
- Profiles of environmental sensitivity among nursing students on clinical placement and their structural associations with failure mindsets: a latent profile and network analysis.Frontiers in psychology · 2026Article
- The Network Structure of PTSD Symptoms in Children and Adolescents Exposed to Potentially Traumatic Events: A Systematic Review.Children (Basel, Switzerland) · 2025Review
- Network Structure of Post-Traumatic Stress and Social/Emotional/Behavioral Difficulties in a Post-Earthquake Child and Adolescent Sample.European journal of investigation in health, psychology and education · 2025Article
- The bright and dark sides of openness on quality of life: the role of emotions and self-efficacy beliefs within a GAMs, a network approach and mediation.BMC psychology · 2025Article
8 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
2 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Network models have become a valuable tool in making sense of a diverse range of social, biological, and information systems. These models marry graph and probability theory to visualize, understand, and interpret variables and their relations as nodes and edges in a graph. Many applications of network models rely on undirected graphs in which the absence of an edge between two nodes encodes conditional independence between the corresponding variables. To gauge the importance of nodes in such a network, various node centrality measures have become widely used, especially in psychology and neuroscience. It is intuitive to interpret nodes with high centrality measures as being important in a causal sense. Using the causal framework based on directed acyclic graphs (DAGs), we show that the relation between causal influence and node centrality measures is not straightforward. In particular, the correlation between causal influence and several node centrality measures is weak, except for eigenvector centrality. Our results provide a cautionary tale: if the underlying real-world system can be modeled as a DAG, but researchers interpret nodes with high centrality as causally important, then this may result in sub-optimal interventions.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.