A Comparative Study of Social Network Tools for Analysing Chinese Elites

For accurately analysing and forecasting the social networks of China's political, economic and social power elites, it is necessary to develop a database that collates their information. The development of such a database involves three stages: data definition, data collection and data quality maintenance. The present study recommends distinctive solutions in overcoming the challenges that occur in existing comparable databases. We used organizational and event factors to identify the Chinese power elites to be included in the database, and used their memberships, social relations and interactions in combination with flows data collection methodologies to determine the associations between them. The system can be used to determine the optimal relationship path (i.e., the shortest path) to reach a target elite and to identify of the most important power elite in a social network (e.g., degree, closeness and eigenvector centrality) or a community (e.g., a clique or a cluster). We have used three social network analysis tools (i.e., R, UCINET and NetMiner) in order to find the important nodes in the network. We compared the results of centrality rankings of each tool. We found that all three tools are providing slightly different results of centrality. This is because different tools use different algorithms and even within the same tool there are various libraries which provide the same functionality (i.e., ggraph, igraph and sna in R that provide the different function to calculate centrality). As there are chances that the results may not be the same (i.e. centrality rankings indicating the most important nodes can be varied), we recommend a comparison test using different tools to get accurate results.