The diagram has all possible undirected edges except : it is a complete graph on five vertices with one edge removed. Therefore and each have three neighbours, while each have four.
The neighbours of and form a triangle, so their clustering coefficients equal one. Each of has five of the six possible neighbour–neighbour edges, giving . The nodal average shortest path length is . All graph distances equal one except , hence
Averaging the nodal quantities gives
The ordered-pair distance sum is , and the graph diameter is two.
If the intended unnormalized “small-worldness” is the ratio of clustering to path length, the computed quantities give
That ratio has no universal threshold for identifying a small-world network. The standard reference-normalized small-worldness, , cannot receive a numerical value when no reference is specified and the question forbids using a network null model.[ref]
The graph has high clustering and short paths in the descriptive sense. With nine of ten possible edges, however, those properties follow directly from its near completeness; they do not by themselves establish small-world network structure relative to a reference. This distinguishes the metrics that can be computed directly from the stronger classification that requires a stated convention.
Average the four local clustering coefficients and the four supplied mean graph distances, using the same weighting convention for the reference networks:
The two reference values average to and . The normalized small-worldness is the relative clustering divided by the relative path length,
This uses the standard ratio-of-ratios definition, with the supplied degree-matched random graphs as the chosen reference ensemble.[ref]
Small-worldness 2026-10-20
Small-worldness compares a network's clustering and average shortest-path length to reference values through . The common classification is a ratio-based convention rather than a significance test; random-reference variability must be assessed separately.[ref]