The history of social networks research is more than fifty years from the research area of sociology to computer science. In recent years, more and more researchers are focusing on how to apply the findings of social networks research as well as to apply the findings for management. In this special issue, there are three papers that have been accepted; the first one is an application of social networks analysis, and the second and third ones are research from the aspect of management and human factors.

The first paper is authored by Charles Perez, Karina Sokolova and Vincent Dutot, which is entitled “Uncovering the strategies and dynamics of research fields using network science: structural evidence from a decade of privacy research.” The main idea of the paper is to better understand the dynamics, organization and collaboration strategies by using social network analysis to a research community. The authors analyzed about 10 years data of co-authored research publication on privacy. The results of the study show the connection types of leaders and other researchers as well as to help to discover similar patterns trough the comparable analyses.

The second paper is an interesting authored by Jun Nakamura, Senetake Nagayoshi and Nozomi Komiya, which is entitled “Anticipation during a cyclic manufacturing process: Toward visual search modeling of human factors.” In their research, they focus on the cycles of work process in the manufacturing industry. They also discuss the modeling of visual searching of human factors according to the findings of the research.

The third paper is a paper entitled “Changes of consumer purchasing behavior of cultural and creative products during the COVID-19 pandemic,” which is authored by Chia-Sung Yen, I-Hsien Ting, Shu-Chen Yang and Chia-Ying Kang. The authors use qualitative research method to study about this issue and found the sales amount of cultural and creative brands has been affected. In addition, the authors also found adding some different product design can bring more attention and positive e-commerce sales.