Citations in the scienti c literature provide accurate base line data for social network analysis. In this talk I will showcase prior research on how FCA was used as a means to analyse a eld of research using published academic papers as its input. In particular, results are presented based on a case study of 47 academic papers in a scienti c eld of study, namely the application of FCA in software engineering. FCA reveals useful insights about the nature of the subject matter: identifying fruitful areas of research as well as producing details about characteristics of the community under examination. The talk can be seen as a roadmap for how FCA can be used in other social network analysis domains such as social media or the twitter sphere highlighting both the strengths and limitations of FCA for this purpose.