Reviewing academic social network mining applications

Social network systems not only play important roles in peoples' social life but also help them in their professional life too. This study explores academic social network systems and particularly focuses on the data extraction methods to develop social relations. Several studies have used search engines to extract social networks from the Web and some systems get their data by description of their members' relation to others like Social Network Services or Friend-Of-A-Friend documents. Both types of data gathering have their own limitations such as data unreliability and scalability of queries to search engines. In this paper, a basic understanding of the issues in academic social network systems is provided. Different approaches to various problems of retrieving reliable data (relational information), as the major item of making these systems, are briefly described, and possible future research directions are discussed.