title: Leadership Insularity: A New Measure of Connectivity Between Central Nodes in Networks.
abstract: We combine two foci of interest with respect to community identification and node centrality and create a novel metric termed "leadership insularity." By determining the most highly connected nodes within each community of a network, we designate the 'community leaders' within the graph. In doing this, we have the basis for a novel metric that examines how connected, or disconnected, the leaders are to each other. This measure has a number of appealing measurement properties and provides a new way of understanding how network structure can affect its dynamics, especially information flow. We explore leadership insularity in a variety of networks.
authors.affiliation: Department of Health Care Policy, Harvard Medical School, Cambridge, Massachusetts.
authors.forename: Samuel
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Arbesman
authors.affiliation: Departments of Health Care Policy & Medicine, Harvard Medical School, Department of Sociology, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts.
authors.forename: Nicholas A
authors.initials: NA
authors.lastname: Christakis