  A community detection algorithm is considered to have a resolution limit if
the scale of the smallest modules that can be resolved depends on the size of
the analyzed subnetwork. The resolution limit is known to prevent some
community detection algorithms from accurately identifying the modular
structure of a network. In fact, any global objective function for measuring
the quality of a two-level assignment of nodes into modules must have some sort
of resolution limit or an external resolution parameter. However, it is yet
unknown how the resolution limit affects the so-called map equation, which is
known to be an efficient objective function for community detection. We derive
an analytical estimate and conclude that the resolution limit of the map
equation is set by the total number of links between modules instead of the
total number of links in the full network as for modularity. This mechanism
makes the resolution limit much less restrictive for the map equation than for
modularity, and in practice orders of magnitudes smaller. Furthermore, we argue
that the effect of the resolution limit often results from shoehorning
multi-level modular structures into two-level descriptions. As we show, the
hierarchical map equation effectively eliminates the resolution limit for
networks with nested multi-level modular structures.
