--- description: "The Core / Bridge / Emerging badges: what each one says about a node's place in your network, why Bridge is the one worth chasing, and where the badges show up." --- # Node Types Some nodes in the node list and the graph carry a badge: **Core** (◎), **Bridge** (↔), **Emerging** (✦). You do not assign these — Jotaid reads them off the shape of your network. ## What Each Badge Says | Badge | It means | Read it as | |-------|----------|-----------| | **Emerging** ✦ | You have been citing it a lot **recently** | What you are thinking about *now* | | **Core** ◎ | Heavily cited, and the concepts around it are tied to each other too | The centre of a dense area of your knowledge | | **Bridge** ↔ | Cited alongside concepts that otherwise have **nothing to do with each other** | It spans several unrelated topics | The difference between Core and Bridge is not how often a node is cited — it is whether **its neighbours also connect to one another**. Around a Core node they do, and it sits inside a tight-knit cluster. Around a Bridge node they do not, and it is the *only* thing tying them together. **Emerging takes priority**: a recently active node is badged Emerging whatever its position in the network. What you are thinking about now is more immediate than where it sits. Nodes meeting none of the three carry **no badge** — not a problem and not a judgement, just a node that is currently neither central, nor bridging, nor frequently cited. ## Why Bridge Deserves Attention Core nodes are intuitive: heavily cited, sitting at the centre of things. **Bridge is the underrated one.** Its reference count may be modest, yet it is the *only* path between several topics that otherwise never meet. Research breakthroughs tend to appear in exactly that position, because what sits on either side has not been thought about together. In the graph's [network insight](https://docs.jotaid.com/en/guide/graph), a network with no bridge nodes at all is called out specifically as an **echo-chamber risk**: tightly clustered and internally sealed off. ## On Very Large Graphs Past several hundred nodes in a project, Jotaid works from a sample rather than examining every node, so the view stays responsive. The cost is that on a very large graph **a node that ought to be Core may go unbadged**. Badges are a navigation aid, not a score — a missing one changes no data and nothing about the node itself. ## Where You See Them - **Node list**: beside each name, with the reference count - **Graph**: node colouring and the legend - **Filters**: narrow to one type ## Next Steps - [Knowledge Graph](https://docs.jotaid.com/en/guide/graph) — How badges distribute across the network - [Co-occurrence Matrix](https://docs.jotaid.com/en/guide/matrix) — The relationships the badges are read from - [Managing Nodes](https://docs.jotaid.com/en/guide/manage-nodes) — Merging concepts that drifted apart