Objective

A systematic review was conducted to know the contributions of social network analysis (SNA) to public health research (PHR).

Materials and Methods

The databases analyzed were Academic Search Complete, PubMed and MEDLINE. A total of 1 151 articles were processed, of which 361 met the inclusion criteria and make up the final sample.

Results

The generic profiles of assessed papers are quantitative (84.5%) and cross-sectional (64.5%), and use conventional statistical procedures to test hypotheses (68.9%). Studies examining the role of networks as a risk factor or health protection (38%), epidemiological research (34.6%), and work analyzing systems that provide social and health care (24.4%) are noteworthy.

Conclusions

Remarkable differences among research were identified at the egocentric and sociocentric levels of analysis. Results are discussed in order to increase the effectiveness of PHR through SNA methods.