# The Four Dimensions of Social Network Analysis: An Overview of Research Methods, Applications, and Software Tools

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2002.09485 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.09485/

## Key facts

- Cited by 9 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 21 Feb 2020.

## Built on by (most cited first, 9 of 9)

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- [Learnability of Competitive Threshold Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.03750/) (2022)
- [A Survey of Social Cybersecurity: Techniques for Attack Detection, Evaluations, Challenges, and Future Prospects](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.04311/) (2025)
- [MMTF-DES: A Fusion of Multimodal Transformer Models for Desire, Emotion, and Sentiment Analysis of Social Media Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.14143/) (2023)
- [DisTrack: a new Tool for Semi-automatic Misinformation Tracking in Online Social Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.00633/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Social network based applications have experienced exponential growth in recent years. One of the reasons for this rise is that this application domain offers a particularly fertile place to test and develop the most advanced computational techniques to extract valuable information from the Web. The main contribution of this work is three-fold: (1) we provide an up-to-date literature review of the state of the art on social network analysis (SNA);(2) we propose a set of new metrics based on four essential features (or dimensions) in SNA; (3) finally, we provide a quantitative analysis of a set of popular SNA tools and frameworks. We have also performed a scientometric study to detect the most active research areas and application domains in this area. This work proposes the definition of four different dimensions, namely Pattern & Knowledge discovery, Information Fusion & Integration, Scalability, and Visualization, which are used to define a set of new metrics (termed degrees) in order to evaluate the different software tools and frameworks of SNA (a set of 20 SNA-software tools are analyzed and ranked following previous metrics). These dimensions, together with the defined degrees, allow evaluating and measure the maturity of social network technologies, looking for both a quantitative assessment of them, as to shed light to the challenges and future trends in this active area.