I'm experimenting with locating clusters in a network and analyzing a structure for fragility by removing links between pairs of nodes that each have high betweenness. The algorithm is pretty easy; look at the list of nodes ranked by betweenness, determine if the top two nodes have a link, if so snip it; if not, search iteratively through the list for the pair of links with the highest combination. Is there any standard metric that computes link centrality directly? (A reference would be good.) Intuitively it would seem to be the "path that's in the most geodesics in the network", and so it should be just about as hard to compute as node centrality. Google on "link centrality" turns up nothing. The motivation for thinking of links as items in their own right is simply that from telecommunications networks, where the circuit between two devices is the source of at least as much cause for analysis as the endpoints. thanks Ed Edward Vielmetti Ann Arbor, MI [log in to unmask]