There are many network repositories out there that offer a large variety of amazing free data. (See the awesome network analysis list on github for an overview.) The problem is, that network data can come in many formats. Either in plain text as edgelist or adjacency matrix, or in a dedicated network file format from which there are many (paj,dl,gexf,graphml,net,gml,…). The package igraph has an import function for these formats ( read_graph() ) but I have found it to be unreliable at times.

The networkdata package collates datasets from many different sources and makes the networks readily available in R. The data is very diverse, ranging from traditional social networks to animal, covert, and movie networks. In total, the package includes 979 datasets containing 2135 networks. As such, I hope this package to be a good resource for teaching, workshops and for research if example data is needed. You can only get so far with the Karate network.

library(igraph) library(networkdata)

Install Due to the nature of the package (only data, no functions), it will not go to CRAN at any point. However, the package is available via drat (If you are looking for stable builds of the package). With drat, you can install and upgrade non-CRAN packages directly from R using the standard install.packages() and update.packages() functions. # install.packages("drat") drat::addRepo("schochastics") install.packages("networkdata") To save on line of code in the future, you can add drat::addRepo("schochastics") to your .Rprofile . The developer version is available via github. remotes::install_github("schochastics/networkdata") The required space for the package is ~22MB, given that it includes a lot of data.