  Identifying influential spreaders in complex networks is a crucial problem
which relates to wide applications. Many methods based on the global
information such as $k$-shell and PageRank have been applied to rank spreaders.
However, most of related previous works overwhelmingly focus on the number of
paths for propagation, while whether the paths are diverse enough is usually
overlooked. Generally, the spreading ability of a node might not be strong if
its propagation depends on one or two paths while the other paths are dead
ends. In this Letter, we introduced the concept of path diversity and find that
it can largely improve the ranking accuracy. We further propose a local method
combining the information of path number and path diversity to identify
influential nodes in complex networks. This method is shown to outperform many
well-known methods in both undirected and directed networks. Moreover, the
efficiency of our method makes it possible to be applied to very large systems.
