Detecting the core of a network by the centralities of the nodes

Abstract Many networks exhibit the core/periphery structure. Core/periphery structure is a type of meso-scale structure that consists of densely connected core nodes and sparsely connected peripheral nodes. Core nodes tend to be well-connected, both among themselves and to peripheral nodes, which tend not to be well-connected to other nodes. In this brief report, we propose a new method to detect the core of a network by the centrality of each node. It is discovered that such nodes with non-negative centralities often consist in the core of the networks. The simulation is carried out on different real networks. The results are checked by the objective function. The checked results may show the effectiveness of the simulation results by the centralities of the nodes on the real networks. Furthermore, we discuss the characters of networks with the single core/periphery structure and point out the scope of the application of our method at the end of this paper.