Overview of social networks research software

This paper discusses the software tools which are used to study of social networks (graphs). The study of social graphs received a significant boost with the development of the Internet, as there was open access to data on different communities, uniting millions of people. This allowed to conduct research on a large amount of real data, but the researcher is now required knowledge from different areas of computer technology and programming. The study of social graphs is a complex task. The researcher is required to obtain data, process them, visualize (build a graph) and calculate the metrics of interest to him. In this paper, we looked at the tools that allow you to implement each stage of the study: the NetworkX library, gephi and Graphviz utilities, and the language for graph representation .dot. In the report, we gave a concrete example of the application of all these software tools to the task of obtaining data about the authors and their co-authors from the Scopus abstract database using the open API provided by these services. Copyright © 2019 for the individual papers by the papers’ authors.