Abstract: By path analysis,the relationship and connecting characteristic in social networks can be discovered,especially,in criminal networks.In this paper,the community discovery algorithm is utilized to obtain the overlapping nodes and construct the hierarchical network model of real social network.And then,by considering the high clustering coefficient and power law distribution of social network,this paper proposes an overlapping-nodes-based hierarchic path algorithm,HOLN,in which the core node distances are used to stand for community space and the overlapping nodes are searched preferentially to simplify node traversal.By the comparison experiment in the scientific cooperation network,it is shown that HOLN algorithm can attain satisfactory performance on the both accuracy and efficiency.