Watts and Strogatz [Nature (London) 393, 440 (1998)] have recently introduced a model for disordered networks and reported that, even for very small values of the disorder $p$ in the links, the network behaves as a “small world.” Here, we test the hypothesis that the appearance of small-world behavior is not a phase transition but a crossover phenomenon which depends both on the network size $n$ and on the degree of disorder $p$. We propose that the average distance $\ell$ between any two vertices of the network is a scaling function of $n/n^{*}$. The crossover size $n^{*}$ above which the network behaves as a small world is shown to scale as $n^{*}(p\ll 1)\sim p^{-\tau }$ with $\tau \approx 2/3$.

• Received 8 December 1998

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevLett.82.3180