Tools from statistical physics for the analysis of social networks

Abstract

This article is to introduce the social scientist concerned with social network analysis and an affinity to quantitative methods to parts of the research done by physicists in the field of complex networks. In fact, much of the research done by physicists has been inspired by examples and problems from sociology. We believe that the methods developed by natural scientists will prove to be valuable tools that allow new insights into data arising in the social sciences. We hope that these methods find their way back into social sciences and find ample application on the problems by which they were originally inspired. © 2009 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.