What is bridge centrality? A comment on Jones, Ma, and McNally (2019)

Jones, Ma, and McNally (2019) introduce a novel network measure called bridge centrality, which aims to quantify psychopathological symptoms that may contribute to comorbidity. Centrality measures in psychometric networks have come under scrutiny recently with several researchers arguing for more explicit interpretations of what they purport to measure. One useful strategy has been to connect centrality measures to more traditional psychometric measures such as factor loadings. In this commentary, we aim to do the same by connecting bridge centrality to a recently developed measure called network loadings, which are roughly equivalent with factor loadings. By re-analyzing a recent simulation study, we demonstrate that bridge centrality (specifically bridge strength and bridge expected influence) are nothing more than the (absolute) sum of network cross-loadings. We provide an empirical example to demonstrate this equivalency as well as to show some potential shortcomings of bridge centrality when there are more than two disorders in a network. We raise concerns over bridge centrality’s utility and recommend researchers use network loadings instead.