Cottica, Alberto, Guy Melançon, and Benjamin Renoust. "Online community management as social network design: testing for the signature of management activities in online communities." Applied Network Science 2.1 (2017): 1-22.

This paper explores the role of community managers in shaping the interaction networks of online communities. It hypothesizes that successful community management practices lead to deviations from power law degree distributions in these networks. Using empirical data and computer simulations, the study finds that community management activities like onboarding result in systematic deviations from power law behavior for low in-degree values. This finding provides a simple test for the effectiveness of community management practices and offers insights into network design in online communities.