Core–periphery detection is a highly relevant task in exploratory network analysis. Given a network of nodes and edges, one is interested in revealing the presence and measuring the consistency of a core–periphery structure using only the network topology. This mesoscale network structure consists of two sets: the core, a set of nodes that is highly connected across the whole network, and the periphery, a set of nodes that is well connected only to the nodes that are in the core. Networks with such a core–periphery structure have been observed in several applications, including economic, social, communication and citation networks. In this talk we discuss a new core–periphery detection model based on the optimization of a class of core–periphery quality functions. While the quality measures are highly nonconvex in general and thus hardly treatable, we show that the global solution coincides with the nonlinear Perron eigenvector of a suitably defined parameter dependent matrix M(x), i.e. the positive solution to the nonlinear eigenvector problem M(x)x=λx. Using recent advances in nonlinear Perron–Frobeniustheory, we discuss uniqueness of the global solution and we propose a nonlinear power method-type scheme that (a) allows us to solve the optimization problem with global convergence guarantees and (b) effectively scales to very large and sparse networks. Finally, we present several numerical experiments showing that the new method largely out-performs state-of-the-art techniques for core-periphery detection.