Song Yang, professor in the Department of Sociology and Criminology in the J. William Fulbright College of Arts and Sciences, recently published the third edition of Social Network Analysis, a book focused on the recording and measuring of social structures using graph and network models.

SAGE Publications release the third edition of Social Network Analysis, authored by Yang and David Knoke in December, and it includes significant developments and changes in practice over the past decade.

Barbara Entwisle, the series editor of SAGE’s Quantitative Applications in the Social Sciences said, "Social Network Analysis is one of the most popular ‘little green books’ in the Quantitative Applications in the Social Sciences series.”

“It draws on the authors' years of experience to provide an initial entrée into a highly complex area of study, laying a firm foundation on which readers at all levels can continue to build,” she said. “With the publication of the third edition, if anything, its popularity will increase."

Social network analysis is the study of societal structure and how it connects people and things. The people or agents in the study are called nodes, and the relationships or exchanges between them are called links, ties or edges. The networks being analyzed are often shown through sociograms, where the nodes are shown as points or dots and the links are shown as lines. 

The third edition of Social Network Analysis provides a concise introduction to the concepts and tools of social network analysis.