Properties of stepwise irregular graphs

Abstract

Stepwise irregular (SI) graphs were introduced by Ivan Gutman recently in 2018 and in these graphs the difference between the degrees of any two adjacent vertices is exactly one. In this work, we show the existence of connected bicyclic SI graphs of order 5 and 9 which has been claimed to be non-existent by Gutman. We also show the existence of SI graphs of different order and cyclomatic numbers when there exist a SI graph with a vertex of degree 1 or 2. We give a characterization on the order of the connected tricyclic SI graphs. At the end, we investigate some properties of the SI graphs under elementary graph operations along with the lower and upper bound of the irregularity of SI graphs.