Watts and Strogatz’s paper was published in June 1998. As of mid-2018, it has been cited 16,505 times. Of the 1.8 million papers published in scientific journals on the topic of networks, their small-world paper ranks #1. It has been cited more than Einstein’s papers on relativity, Dirac’s paper on the positron, or any paper in history published on “fundamental” physics.
