Silence on the relevant literature and errors in implementation

In the August 2013 issue of this journal, Barzel & Barabasi reported a method for reconstructing network topologies. Here we show that the Barzel & Barabasi method is a variant of a previously published method, modular response analysis (MRA). We also demonstrate that the implementation of their algorithm using statistical similarity measures as a proxy for global network responses to perturbations is erroneous and its performance is overestimated.