Bipartite structure of all complex networks

The analysis and modelling of various complex networks has received much attention in the last few years. Some such networks display a natural bipartite structure: two kinds of nodes coexist with links only between nodes of different kinds. This bipartite structure has not been deeply studied until now, mainly because it appeared to be specific to only a few complex networks. However, we show here that all complex networks can be viewed as bipartite structures sharing some important statistics, like degree distributions. The basic properties of complex networks can be viewed as consequences of this underlying bipartite structure. This leads us to propose the first simple and intuitive model for complex networks which captures the main properties met in practice. (C) 2004 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.