Dear Matúš Mišík

About sources, it depends on the type of social network you want to analyze. If you are interested in family networks, you can use demographic census microdata that contain households information and the relationships among their members. If you analyze migration, you can use the information about the place of origin of migrants in their residence at place of destination, especially in spatial clusters.

https://sna.stanford.edu/courses.php is a list of useful social network courses. What type of networks are you asking about?

Perhaps the most well-known journal in the field is Social Networks: https://www.journals.elsevier.com/social-networks/. You find many methodological and applied articles there from different fields of research ( e.g., anthropology, sociology, history, social psychology, political science, human geography, biology, economics, communications science ).

Best wishes,

Alrik

Thank you for your advices! We are working on an analysis of literature published in energy policy field and a colleague suggested network analysis as a way to examine how research teams look like and where do they come from. We would therefore like to learn more about network analysis as a tool in general before applying it to our case.

The standard reference is Wasserman and Faust (1993), nevertheless, it is quite technical. More accessible introductory texts are provided by: Robins (2015), Borgatti, Everett, and Johnson (2013) - with a nice chapter on research design, Kadushin (2011), Scott (2011), or Prell (2012). There is also an online UCINET-oriented textbook by Hanneman and Riddle: http://www.faculty.ucr.edu/~hanneman/nettext/ Also, a classic text on co-authorship networks: http://www.soc.duke.edu/~jmoody77/asr_soccoauth.pdf

I think that the book edited by Emmanuel Lazega and Tom Snijders on: Mutlilevel network analysis for the social sciences, Methodos Series, Springer, 2016, may be a very good introduction to this extension of multilevel analysis. If you want to compare this kind of analysis with others (event history, sequence analysis, multilevel analysis and agent based models) you may be interested to read the paper I recently published on: Do different approaches in population science lead to divergent or convergent models?

Matuš,

When you say... "working on an analysis of literature published in energy policy field" are you focused on "co-authors" or "citations"? Either can be analyzed using network analysis. You can do a document-to-document network and/or an author-to-author network from the same data set.

Attached is a network map from a project we did... the map can show:

1) Network of Authors based on Publications

2) Network of Publications based on Authors

Node colors designate clusters (more connections within group than outside of group)

Valdis

You can begin by reading some papers such as :

https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/67c7/eb8bd0fb8cca2a88e40a2627410df18ddeab.pdf

Mist of what you got is in quants because that's where it originated.NVivo 11 Plus has social networks as well if you're interested in triangulation etc etc

Do you mean the analysis of social media networks? if so, i can help you with some materials.

Thanks! We are actually working on a state-of-the-art paper and somebody suggested that network analysis can help us to analyse cooperation patterns between individual authors. So we are trying to learn about the tool as much as possible.

This book would be helpful for you.

Dear Matúš ,

Thank you very much for that.

In case Python programming is an option, I would go for Networkx (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NetworkX)

This package assumes a background on Graph Theory.