IOP Publishing, New Journal of Physics, 4(10), p. 043002, 2008
DOI: 10.1088/1367-2630/10/4/043002
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We propose that the rich-club phenomenon in complex networks should be defined in the spirit of bootstrapping, in which a null model is adopted to assess the statistical significance of the rich-club detected. Our method can serve as a definition of the rich-club phenomenon and is applied to analyze three real networks and three model networks. The results show significant improvement compared with previously reported results. We report a dilemma with an exceptional example, showing that there does not exist an omnipotent definition for the rich-club phenomenon.