The academic study of networks was only a decade old when SFI External Professor Mark Newman first published a compendium on the topic in 2010. His nearly-800-page textbook, Networks: An Introduction, offered an overview of the field at the time. The book quickly became a foundational textbook for university courses, living up to the prediction of one reviewer, who wrote in Frontiers in Genetics in 2012, “as Network Science graduate-level courses proliferate around the world, this book is very likely to become a classic textbook.”
Now, eight years after the original edition, it’s time for an update. Networks, second edition will be published by Oxford University Press in early September 2018.
“It’s a fast-moving field, and a lot has changed,” says Newman. “There are new papers coming out every day.” Networks second edition reflects those recent advances, including new material on community detection, complex contagion, network statistics, and multilayer networks.
“This is the definitive book on networks, friendly enough for anyone to read and serious enough for researchers to find their way,” says SFI Professor Cris Moore. “Mark is one of the founders and leaders of the field and has updated the book with cutting-edge topics.”
Even with the new material, the book still wraps up at 800 pages. Every year, Newman offers a course in network theory at the University of Michigan. “The experience of teaching a course based on this book has given me a better idea of how to balance the topics – what new material I needed to add, and where I could condense,” he says.
Even as this new edition hits the stands, the field of networks continues its rapid development. “There are clearly many areas where we know there are interesting things yet to discover, we just haven’t discovered them yet,” says Newman.