This is the Ruef paper if anyone is interested. http://www.jstor.org/stable/1519766 http://www.jstor.org/stable/1519766 The study of social networks is incredi

This is the Ruef paper if anyone is interested. http://www.jstor.org/stable/1519766 http://www.jstor.org/stable/1519766 The study of social networks is incredibly fascinating, but the discipline is definitely in a nascent state. I think one of the biggest issues is that there is operational definition of a social tie. If you a create a network of people that a person has interacted with over a lifetime, it will likely look very different from the network of people the same person has interacted with over the last 30 days. That's just one of the big problems to solve in the discipline. Since it's not a perfect science, it's going to be hard to provide "just the facts."