Watts and Strogatz cited 27 sources in their article. On the other hand. Watts and Strogatz was cited 8,709 times by other authors. Of the 8,709 instances of citation, a large portion of it were general science related in the fields related to physics and computer science. The top three authors that cited Watts and Strogatz’s article were Chen, G. (76 times), Wang, B. (71 times), and Zhou T. (68 times).

The instances that cited back to Watts and Strogatz’s article were mainly physics journals. This is followed by a moderate amount by computer science, and the least amount by mechanic.