Given a network, its Pathfinder network is the combination of all its minimum spanning trees. Alternatively, a Pathfinder is also defined as a network scaling process. The process removes links in a network that violate the triangular inequality assumption. The network with the remaining links is the Pathfinder network. A Pathfinder network can be considered as a compromise between a network with an excessive number of links and its potentially arbitrarily chosen minimum spanning tree.
CiteSpace allows users to prune a network, i.e. to reduce the number of links and retain the most salient ones. A network can be pruned to a Pathfinder network scaling or a minimum spanning tree, especially the total number of links in the network is excessive.

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