[transcranial]

Here's a recent follow-up paper [1] testing exactly that on many diverse datasets, positing that scale-free (power-law distributed) networks are actually not that common in the real world. Quanta has a nice article about it [2].

[1] https://arxiv.org/abs/1801.03400

[2] https://www.quantamagazine.org/scant-evidence-of-power-laws-...