A Critical Review of Centrality Measures in Social Networks

Andrea Landherr (), Bettina Friedl () and Julia Heidemann ()

Business & Information Systems Engineering: The International Journal of WIRTSCHAFTSINFORMATIK, 2010, vol. 2, issue 6, 385 pages

Abstract: Social networks are currently gaining increasing impact in the light of the ongoing growth of web-based services like facebook.com. One major challenge for the economically successful implementation of selected management activities such as viral marketing is the identification of key persons with an outstanding structural position within the network. For this purpose, social network analysis provides a lot of measures for quantifying a member’s interconnectedness within social networks. In this context, our paper shows the state of the art with regard to centrality measures for social networks. Due to strongly differing results with respect to the quality of different centrality measures, this paper also aims at illustrating the tremendous importance of a reflected utilization of existing centrality measures. For this purpose, the paper analyzes five centrality measures commonly discussed in literature on the basis of three simple requirements for the behavior of centrality measures. Copyright Gabler Verlag 2010

Keywords: Social network; Interconnectedness; Centrality measures; Social network analysis (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2010
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (34)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1007/s12599-010-0127-3 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:binfse:v:2:y:2010:i:6:p:371-385

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/economics/journal/12599

DOI: 10.1007/s12599-010-0127-3

Access Statistics for this article

Business & Information Systems Engineering: The International Journal of WIRTSCHAFTSINFORMATIK is currently edited by Martin Bichler

More articles in Business & Information Systems Engineering: The International Journal of WIRTSCHAFTSINFORMATIK from Springer, Gesellschaft für Informatik e.V. (GI)
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().