Surprised to hear this about Barabasi, I'm no physicist but enjoyed reading his books on network science as a layperson.
Is there any published criticism against his work? His papers get cited everywhere, I know citations are more metric of popularity than scientific quality but I find it puzzling that his work continues to get attention if the results don't hold up.
You could start with Pachter's sendup (https://liorpachter.wordpress.com/2014/02/10/the-network-non...), and the Wikipedia article on Barabasi has a short section on criticisms. I read his work, figured out it was nonsense, and put him on the list of authors whose papers I automatically threw in the garbage. Kim Lewis is another one of those.
