diff --git a/util-networks.R b/util-networks.R
index 2e159fcc..a54129b4 100644
--- a/util-networks.R
+++ b/util-networks.R
@@ -1674,9 +1674,18 @@ merge.network.data = function(vertex.data, edge.data) {
     edge.data.filtered = Filter(function(ed) {
         return(nrow(ed) > 0)
     }, edge.data)
-    ## 2) call rbind
+    ## 2) add in missing columns
+    all.columns = Reduce(union, lapply(edge.data.filtered, colnames))
+    edge.data.filtered = lapply(edge.data.filtered, function(edges) {
+        missing.columns = setdiff(all.columns, colnames(edges))
+        for (column in missing.columns) {
+            edges[[column]] = NA
+        }
+        return(edges)
+    })
+    ## 3) call rbind
     edges = plyr::rbind.fill(edge.data.filtered)
-    ## 3) correct empty results
+    ## 4) correct empty results
     if (is.null(edges)) {
         edges = create.empty.edge.list()
     }
@@ -1807,7 +1816,7 @@ add.edges.for.bipartite.relation = function(net, bipartite.relations, network.co
 
         ## convert edge attributes to list similarely to 'convert.edge.attributes.to.list'
         edge.attrs = names(extra.edge.attributes)
-        which.attrs = !(edge.attrs %in% EDGE.ATTR.HANDLING)
+        which.attrs = !(edge.attrs %in% names(EDGE.ATTR.HANDLING))
         for (attr in edge.attrs[which.attrs]) {
             extra.edge.attributes[[attr]] = as.list(extra.edge.attributes[[attr]])
         }