Comment on: 'Universal Behavior of Load Distribution in Scale-free Networks'

Marc Barthelemy

Published 2003-04-14, updated 2003-10-29Version 3

In a previous Letter (cond-mat/0106565), Goh et al have presented a numerical study of the load--or betweenness centrality--distribution in a scale-free network whose degree distribution follows a power law with a tunable exponent $\gamma$. They showed that the load $\ell$ is distributed according to a power-law with exponent $\delta$. The authors claimed that $\delta$ is universal, ie. independent of the exponent $\gamma$. In this comment, we use two different ways of checking numerically this universality and we show that it does not hold.