Aggregation kinetics of popularity

The tools of aggregation kinetics are applied to the “popularity” phenomena of single-lane traffic clustering, and to the growth of a network that mimics citations of scientific publications. In the latter, the network is built by introducing papers (new nodes) one at a time, with preferential linking to more popular previously existing nodes. From the rate equations, the distribution of node degree, as well as various global properties, can be determined easily. A simple extension of the model appears to describe the degree distributions of the world-wide web.