Editorial: Social Network Analysis in Marketing: A Step-by-Step Guide for Researchers

In a business-to-business setting, social networks comprise direct and indirect connections between firms that provide access to new information, knowledge, and resources that otherwise may not be available to the firms. Social network analysis (SNA), which refers to studying and mapping social structures through graph theory, has been widely used in many social science fields, including management. The interest in SNA is also growing among marketing scholars. This editorial discusses the main aspects of SNA and provides a step-by-step guide to researchers on how to conduct SNA in marketing, with a particular focus on the interorganizational context. The purpose of this editorial is to encourage social network research within marketing. We introduce key theoretical constructs in SNA, discuss their operationalization, and offer detailed instructions on constructing them using UCINET 6 (a common software package to implement SNA). The practical application of SNA is made on strategic alliance data collected from the Securities Data Company (SDC) Platinum database.