[cjslep]

And my perspective is from someone who does research on small-world networks in their spare time.

For me it's a matter of having access. I can easily find seminal papers like Kleinberg or Watts-Strogatz. Anything that is more recent and builds off of these papers tends to be locked up and I'm not able to afford buying these papers one-off, since I don't even know for sure they'll be in a direction useful to my research.