Research productivity and collaborations are essential aspects of advancing academia. Publishing is a critical mechanism in higher education to allow faculty members to share new information in all disciplinary fields. Due to its importance, scholarly work is often heavily considered for promotion, tenure, compensation, and other merit decisions. Social network analysis (SNA) offers a useful methodology for evaluating productivity and collaborations within research networks. The purpose of this paper is to present a primer of SNA and demonstrate how SNA can be used to discern faculty research productivity and collaborations in highly integrated and complex research networks.