One Citation at a Time

Within the last day or two, I tripped 1000 citations for 2021 according to Google Scholar. Thank you, OpenSees! A colleague in Eastchester asked if the blog has helped my citation count. I don't think it has, except for reminding a couple people to cite OpenSees somehow instead of simply writing "We used OpenSees" somewhere … Continue reading One Citation at a Time →

Nobody Wants to Read Your Sh!t

Although far removed from earthquake engineering and academic writing, we can learn a lot from writers of advertising and fiction. The most important lesson I've learned is that nobody wants to read your shit. Steven Pressfield wrote an entire book about it, but I'm pretty sure the phrase was around long before the book. https://www.amazon.com/Nobody-Wants-Read-Your-Sh-ebook/dp/B01GZ1TJBI … Continue reading Nobody Wants to Read Your Sh!t →

Go Cite Yourself

Metric-driven academia, with its focus on h-indices and impact factors, has led to shady behaviors like citation cartels and publication bounties. Superfluous self-citations are also shady, but a few self-citations are natural when developing a line of research. So, go ahead and post a selfie. https://twitter.com/mikusscott/status/975382276434378752 Think of the baristas at your local coffee shop. … Continue reading Go Cite Yourself →

No Framework for Old Men

You've run a bunch of OpenSees analyses with Concrete23 and developed some fragility functions. Now you need to write about it. This blog occasionally addresses academic writing, e.g., here and here. While there's a lot of good (and bad) writing advice out there, some of the best advice comes from outside engineering. For example, I … Continue reading No Framework for Old Men →

How to Cite a Blog Post

How to cite OpenSees was one of the blog's first posts. Several posts have been made since. Most of them non-sense, but there's a couple that have enough technical content to be citation-worthy. Based on its style guide, ASCE treats blog posts like a website where you provide the author, title and publication year of … Continue reading How to Cite a Blog Post →

You Know You’ll Have to Write About It

The odds are, if you're running OpenSees analyses, you're going to write about it, whether it's a thesis/dissertation, technical report, funding proposal, conference paper, or journal article. Several writing books are available and some are very good. One book that I've found useful is Becoming an Academic Writer by Patricia Goodson. The title may sound … Continue reading You Know You’ll Have to Write About It →

The Prevalence of OpenSees in JSE

In Write It Up, Paul J. Silvia describes three journal tiers that apply to any field: Journals that everyone in your field sees as among the best (smallest tier)Important journals that contain most of the field's work (largest tier)"The seamy underbelly of scholarly publishing" In my opinion, the ASCE Journal of Structural Engineering (JSE) is … Continue reading The Prevalence of OpenSees in JSE →

Thoughts After a Year of Blogging

Here are some random thoughts from the blog's first year. Prior to my first post, which was insubstantial and lame, I came up with about 45 ideas for posts of actual substance and saved them in my Drafts folder. Some of the ideas were, and still are, junk and will never be published. But, even … Continue reading Thoughts After a Year of Blogging →

With or Without You

Citation-based metrics are like lottery tickets--they are not for investment purposes and should be used for entertainment only. Unfortunately, some promotion and tenure evaluators treat citation-based metrics like investment decisions. To aid in evaluation, citation-based metrics are readily available online, ranging from Web of Science, which indexes only archival publications, to Google Scholar, which indexes … Continue reading With or Without You →

Abstract Thoughts

Abstracts are an important part of scholarly publications. Journal editors select reviewers based on the abstract, conference organizers select presentations and invite full length papers based on an abstract (sometimes an extended abstract), and online databases crawl the abstract when indexing search results. In this post, I will give my two cents on journal abstracts. … Continue reading Abstract Thoughts →