Compare methods

	Core-Periphery Analysis	Positional Analysis
Field	Sociology	Sociology
Family	Process / pipeline	Process / pipeline
Year of origin	2000	1976
Originator	Stephen Borgatti & Martin Everett	Harrison White, Ronald Burt, and colleagues
Type	Network partition into a dense core and a sparse periphery	Framework for identifying network positions and the roles among them
Seminal source	Borgatti, S. P., & Everett, M. G. (2000). Models of core/periphery structures. Social Networks, 21(4), 375–395.	Burt, R. S. (1976). Positions in networks. Social Forces, 55(1), 93–122.
Aliases	core/periphery model, Borgatti-Everett core-periphery, core-periphery structure detection, coreness analysis	role analysis, positional role analysis, network role and position analysis, regular equivalence analysis
Related	5	5
Summary	Core/periphery analysis partitions a network into a densely interconnected core of actors and a sparse periphery whose members connect to the core but not to one another. Formalized by Borgatti and Everett, the method fits the observed adjacency matrix to an idealized block pattern — a fully connected core block, an empty periphery block, and core–periphery blocks of intermediate density — to test whether and how strongly a network exhibits this canonical mesoscale structure.	Positional analysis is the network-analytic program that identifies the positions actors occupy — sets of actors equivalent in their relational patterns — and characterizes the system of roles that links those positions. Growing out of Harrison White's structuralism and Ronald Burt's operationalization in the 1970s, it treats the social structure as a small set of positions and the role relations among them, rather than as a collection of individual actors.