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 →

Recognizable Dates as Self-Imposed Deadlines

A few years ago, a colleague in Eastchester pointed out the July 4 submission date of an article they had just read. We thought it was a bold move for the author to have submitted a manuscript on a national holiday, in the summertime, when very few US academics are working. But perhaps there was … Continue reading Recognizable Dates as Self-Imposed Deadlines →

One More OpenSees Analysis

I've always felt I should write more. I procrastinated, I waited for inspiration, etc. But I never knew how to go about fixing these issues, even after getting tenure and being promoted to full professor. By that point, I should have been the master of everything, right? Ha! Then I discovered Paul J. Silvia's How … Continue reading One More OpenSees Analysis →

How to Cite OpenSees

In the $latex R^{42}$ space that defines academic performance evaluation, citation-based metrics comprise a small but often over-emphasized subspace. Based on the developers' Google Scholar profiles, it is clear that OpenSees generates a lot of citations from various corners of cyberspace. In the citation-stingy field of structural engineering, the numbers are impressive. On the other … Continue reading How to Cite OpenSees →