Moreoever, Ravasz and Barabasi (2003) introduce the notion of clustering coefficient dependence on node degree as an index of the hierarchical structures found in real networkssuch as the WWW, the Actor Network based on the www.IMDB.com database-which are based on the hierarchical model of (Dorogovski, Goltsev, & Mendes, 2001).
the hierarchical nature of a network can be characterized by using the average clustering coefficient, C(k), of nodes with k degrees, which will follow a scaling law such as , where β is defined as a hierarchical exponent.