Fig. 5: Knowledge circulation process and models for the three major components.

a Diffusion process in the three biggest components of the graph shown in Fig. 4. Each component starts at a different time. The beginning of the pink (giant) component roughly corresponds to the end of the green (second in size) component and the blue (third in size) component begins when the giant component starts slowing down. b Fitting to each curve of knowledge spread and corresponding parameters of the Bass model for each curve. R-square for both pink and green component equals to 0.99 and for the blue component is 0.98. The high values of R-square indicate that the models explain perfectly the original data sets.