Abstract:Research on the influence of social network nodes is one of the key issues in social network analysis. Over the past decade, with the rapid development of online social networks, researchers have the opportunity to analyze and model node influence on many real social networks to achieve fruitful research results which can be applied in a wide range of applications. This paper analyzes and summarizes the main research efforts of social network influence analysis in recent years. First, different definitions of influence, influence functional scope and forms of influence are introduced. Next, models and methods of measuring of node influence are discussed and analyzed in detail with respect to network topology, user behavior and content analysis. Then, literatures about influence spreading and influence maximization model are summarized. Moreover, different indexes for evaluating influence methods are compared, and applications related influence are also presented. Finally, some future research directions on influence analysis are suggested based on the review and analysis of existing research efforts.