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Effectively harnessing available data to support homeland‐security‐related applications is a major focus in the emerging science of intelligence and security informatics (ISI). Many studies have focused on criminal‐network analysis as a major challenge within the ISI domain. Though various methodologies have been proposed, none have been tested for usefulness in creating link charts. This study compares manually created link charts to suggestions made by the proposed importance‐flooding algorithm. Mirroring manual investigational processes, our iterative computation employs association‐strength metrics, incorporates path‐based node importance heuristics, allows for case‐specific notions of importance, and adjusts based on the accuracy of previous suggestions. Interesting items are identified by leveraging both node attributes and network structure in a single computation. Our data set was …