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March 18, 2026Findings0 citationsOpen Access

Betweenness Centrality is not a Network Resilience Metric

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MCMatthew Conway

Key Points

  • The aim is to challenge the validity of betweenness centrality as a measure of network resilience.
  • Examined the definition and application of betweenness centrality in different network contexts.
  • Provided hypothetical examples illustrating its failure to identify resilience.
  • Compared betweenness centrality to true resilience metrics.
  • Demonstrated that betweenness centrality does not reliably indicate resilience issues in networks.
  • Identified specific scenarios where betweenness centrality is misleading.
  • Concluded that alternative metrics may be needed for accurate resilience assessment.

Abstract

Betweenness centrality measures the importance of a link or node in a network based on how often it falls on the shortest path between other nodes. It was originally introduced in social network analysis, where it is interpreted as the ability an actor has to moderate communication between others in the network. In transportation, it is often used as a measure of the resilience impact of a particular link. In this article, I argue that betweenness centrality is not a theoretically valid measure of resilience, and provide hypothetical networks where it clearly fails to identify resilience issues.

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Cite This Study

Matthew Conway (2026) studied this question.

synapsesocial.com/papers/69ba434a4e9516ffd37a452bhttps://doi.org/10.32866/001c.159015
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