Abstract

Social Network Analysis is attracting growing attention as social networking sites and their enabled applications transform and impact society. This paper aims to provide a comprehensive review of social network analysis state of the art research and practice. In the paper we first examine social networking and the core concepts and ingredients of social network analysis. Secondly, we review the trend of social networking and related research. We then consider modelling motivations, discussing models in line with tie formation approaches, where connections between nodes are taken into account. We outline data collection approaches along with the common structural properties observed in related literature. We discuss future directions and the emerging approaches in social network analysis research, notably semantic social networks and social interaction analysis.