  During decades the study of networks has been divided between the efforts of
social scientists and natural scientists, two groups of scholars who often do
not see eye to eye. In this review I present an effort to mutually translate
the work conducted by scholars from both of these academic fronts hoping to
continue to unify what has become a diverging body of literature. I argue that
social and natural scientists fail to see eye to eye because they have
diverging academic goals. Social scientists focus on explaining how context
specific social and economic mechanisms drive the structure of networks and on
how networks shape social and economic outcomes. By contrast, natural
scientists focus primarily on modeling network characteristics that are
independent of context, since their focus is to identify universal
characteristics of systems instead of context specific mechanisms. In the
following pages I discuss the differences between both of these literatures by
summarizing the parallel theories advanced to explain link formation and the
applications used by scholars in each field to justify their approach to
network science. I conclude by providing an outlook on how these literatures
can be further unified.
