ArticleScientific reports2020
The ambiguity of nestedness under soft and hard constraints.
Article in Scientific reports, 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 8 papers.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
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Who cites it
8 citing papers in PubMed, 22 citations in OpenAlex.
- Network evolution of centrality maximizing agents: An empirical evidence of nestedness emergence.PNAS nexus · 2025Article
- Key concepts and a world-wide look at plant recruitment networks.Biological reviews of the Cambridge Philosophical Society · 2025Review
- Article
- Capability accumulation patterns across economic, innovation, and knowledge-production activities.Scientific reports · 2023Article
- Bow-tie structures of twitter discursive communities.Scientific reports · 2022Article
- Comparing alternatives to the fixed degree sequence model for extracting the backbone of bipartite projections.Scientific reports · 2021Article
- Italian Twitter semantic network during the Covid-19 epidemic.EPJ data science · 2021Article
- The Coexistence Relationship Between Plants and Soil Bacteria Based on Interdomain Ecological Network Analysis.Frontiers in microbiology · 2021Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
5 authors at 2 institutions in 3 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Many real networks feature the property of nestedness, i.e. the neighbours of nodes with a few connections are hierarchically nested within the neighbours of nodes with more connections. Despite the abstract simplicity of this notion, various mathematical definitions of nestedness have been proposed, sometimes giving contrasting results. Moreover, there is an ongoing debate on the statistical significance of nestedness, since random networks where the number of connections (degree) of each node is fixed to its empirical value are typically as nested as real ones. By using only ergodic and unbiased null models, we propose a clarification that exploits the recent finding that random networks where the degrees are enforced as hard constraints (microcanonical ensembles) are thermodynamically different from random networks where the degrees are enforced as soft constraints (canonical ensembles). Indeed, alternative definitions of nestedness can be negatively correlated in the microcanonical one, while being positively correlated in the canonical one. This result disentangles distinct notions of nestedness captured by different metrics and highlights the importance of making a principled choice between hard and soft constraints in null models of ecological networks.
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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.