The 60th Anniversary of the Journal of Engineering Mechanics

The special collection on the 60th Anniversary of the Journal of Engineering Mechanics is available in the ASCE Library at http://ascelibrary.org/page/jenmdt/engineering_mechanics_60th.

This online collection of invited papers celebrates the 60th anniversary of the Journal of Engineering Mechanics. All of the authors enthusiastically accepted my invitation to contribute to this collection not only because of this special occasion, but also because they recognize that the Journal is the premier mechanics journal whose “center of gravity” is within the Engineering Mechanics Institute’s (EMI’s) broad definition of civil engineering. The articles in this collection reflect the depth and breadth of the research that is regularly published in the Journal and that is championed by EMI. Since its beginning, the Journal has published many of the seminal and high-impact papers that have advanced the science of mechanics and its application to engineering design. There is no doubt that it will continue to do so, because the prestige and interest in publishing in the Journal has monotonically increased over the past decade. This is evidenced by an increase from approximately 220 to 600 in yearly submissions, a reduction from approximately 70 to 30% in acceptance rate, and an increase from 1.0 to 1.5 in impact factor. All of this could not have been accomplished without the dedication of the Journal’s associate editors and reviewers, who have been responsible for a reduction in the time to first decision of submitted manuscripts from approximately 6 to 3 months while maintaining rigorous standards. So how does the Journal stack up with its competitors? As I wrote in a previous issue, one widely used quantitative metric for assessing impact is the $h$-index. Just as individual researchers are associated with an $h$-index, so are journals; these can be found in the SCImago Journal and Country Rank, which provides information contained in the Scopus database. Since 2014, the Journal’s $h$-index has climbed from 68 to 89. This value is associated with the relatively small window of observation 1983–2012, thus making it even more impressive when compared to some of the Journal’s competitors, which include the ASME Journal of Applied Mechanics ($h\text{-}\mathrm{index}=73$ for 1970–2013), the Journal of the Mechanics and Physics of Solids ($h\text{-}\mathrm{index}=127$, counted for the much longer period of 1952–2013), and the International Journal of Solids and Structures ($h\text{-}\mathrm{index}=117$, also for the much longer period of 1965–2013).

I hope you will enjoy reading the papers in this wonderful collection, and I strongly encourage you to submit your best work to the Journal of Engineering Mechanics so that its tradition of excellence will continue well into the 21st century.