Watts and Strogatz cited 27 references in their study which were spread across such subjects as math, natural science including ecology  and psychology. They themselves were cited a total of 8,749 times and those citations were mostly concentrated in the fields of physics followed by math and computer. The top 3 authors citing Watts and Strogatz’s work were Cheng GR (1.116 %), Wang BH (1.043 %) and Zhou T (0.999 %).

The areas utilizing the most citations for this work is the field of physics (46.872 %) which is almost half of the total results. The next two largest fields are computer science (14.244 %) followed by math (10.382 %). Over the years and up until 2013 the pattern of citations has shown a continuous upward trend which shows that this study is still highly relevant and useful even today.