Malgorzata J. Krawczyk

The actors are placed at nodes of the complete weighted graph. They are endowed with densities of contact with the other actors and with positions in a social hierarchy. These characteristics evolve in time according to the homophily principle and the Matthew effect. The result is that an actor with minimal status is excluded, and all other actors get the same high position. As for examples, the results allow us to make reference to racial criteria of promotion in the London Metropolitan Police, and to the scapegoating phenomenon, described in the literature.

The studies of international scientific cooperation have been present in the literature since the early 1990s. However, much less is known about this cooperation at the intercontinental level. Very recently Krawczyk and Malarz (Chaos 33(11):111102, 2023), showed that the rank-based probability distribution of the sequences of ‘continents (number of countries)’ in the authors’ affiliations shows a clear power law with an exponent close to 1.9. In this paper, we focus on the analysis of almost 14 million papers. Based on the affiliations of their authors, we created lists of sequences ‘continent (number of countries)’—at the intercontinental level—and ‘country (number of authors)’ sequences—at the international level—and analysed them in terms of their frequency. In contrast to the intercontinental level, the rank-based probability distribution of the ‘country (number of authors)’ sequences in the authors’ affiliations reveals a broken power law distribution.

In this paper, we investigate the time evolution of the rank correlation coefficients of the prestige indicators of the journals (such as Scimago Journal Rank) over 21 years, for 9856 journals in various disciplines. The observed dependencies do not differ qualitatively from those observed for the time evolution of the ranking correlations in wealth rheology among the richest people recently found by Burda et al. [Entropy 23, 842 (2021)], but quantitatively the changes in rank correlations for human wealth are much stronger than in the coefficients measuring the prestige of journals. In terms of Kendall’s rank correlation coefficients, disciplines “Agricultural and Biological Sciences” and “Earth and Planetary Science” are the most typical, meaning that the time evolution of their rank correlation coefficient based on Scimago Journal Rank is closest to the time evolution of an average over all disciplines. The time evolution of the mean value of the overlap ratio is closest to the time evolution of the overlap ratio for “Psychology” and “Physics and Astronomy” disciplines. The Kendall rank correlation coefficients and the overlap ratio decrease nearly linearly over time, except for the first year, where their decay is significantly faster. The analogy between human wealth and the prestige indicators of journals is strengthened by performing a Monte Carlo simulation of the time evolution of the probability distribution function of Scimago Journal Rank. The simulation is based on a simple model of economic systems. Due to the different coverage of the journals in Scimago Journal & Country Rank and Web of Science, the identically defined measures based on the data in these databases are different.

Scientific cooperation on an international level has been well studied in the literature. However, much less is known about this cooperation on an intercontinental level. In this paper, we address this issue by creating a collection of approximately 13.8×106 publications around the papers by one of the highly cited authors working in complex networks and their applications. The obtained rank-frequency distribution of the probability of sequences describing continents and the number of countries—with which authors of papers are affiliated—follows the power law with an exponent −1.9108(15). Such dependence is known in the literature as Zipf’s law, and it has been originally observed in linguistics; later, it turned out that it is very commonly observed in various fields. The number of distinct “continent (number of countries)” sequences in a function of the number of analyzed papers grows according to power law with exponent 0.527(14); i.e., it follows Heap’s law.

Nijmegen breakage syndrome (NBS) is a rare autosomal recessive disease, affecting mainly patients of Slavic origin. It is caused by a defect in the NBN gene, resulting in defective nibrin protein formation. This leads to chromosomal instability, which predisposes to cancer, with lymphoid malignancies predominating. Nibrin is also involved in gonadal development and its disfunction in females with NBS frequently results in a pure gonadal dysgenesis (PGD) causing hypergonadotropic hypogonadism. However, only a few ovarian tumors in NBS patients have been reported to date. We describe the first case of a girl with NBS with PGD, who developed metachronous bilateral ovarian germ cell tumors (dysgerminoma and gonadoblastoma). Pathogenesis of PGD, neoplastic transformation and therapeutic approach in females with NBS are discussed.