Next: Introduction

Two Case Studies in the Diffusion of Scientific Information via the Internet

Howard Gutowitz
Ecole Supérieure de Physique
et Chimie Industrielles
Laboratoire d'Electronique
10 rue Vauquelin
75005 Paris
and
The Santa Fe Institute
1399 Hyde Park Road
Santa Fe, NM 87501

1995

Abstract:

This report concerns a pilot study of patterns of access to scientific documents made available on the internet, in particular, the World-Wide Web. Its goal is to suggest that the behavior of internet users can be subject to scientific analysis, and further, that the tools of statistical mechanics may be of some value in this analysis.

One case studied is a document written according to the traditional model of the scientific article, but made available on the World-Wide Web. The other case is a document written in an intrinsically net-oriented model, and also available on the web. The statistics of access to these documents are rather different. While the first document appears to relax to equilibrium, the second document appears to be in a (self-organized) critical state.

Howard A. Gutowitz
Sun Dec 10 22:56:22 MST 1995