Stepping Down, Stepping Up: Same Outstanding Journal

Exactly one decade after taking the helm in 2010 and 22 years after joining the board of the Journal of Structural Engineering (JSE), I proudly stepped down from my position as editor in chief on September 30, 2020. During my time on the JSE board, I constantly marveled at the profound impact that papers published in the Journal have had on our profession. These papers have informed code committees writing national and international structural engineering specifications, launched entirely new lines of research, and pioneered advances at the intersection of structural engineering and emerging areas including computational simulation, sensing, machine learning, community risk assessment, visualization, materials engineering, manufacturing methods, and robotics. These highly impactful papers did not find their place in JSE by chance. Based on a strategy designed to lead our field forward, they were carefully selected from among thousands of submitted papers and shaped by JSE’s intensely rigorous review process. Thanks to JSE’s superb and meticulous board, I leave the Journal in exceptional shape, ready to face the new decade as the premier structural engineering publication in our field.

During my tenure as editor in chief, I reorganized the board to make it more nimble and responsive to the rapid changes buffeting our field. For many years before I joined the board, JSE had either one or sometimes two managing editors, each of whom led large teams of associate editors (AEs) to handle submitted manuscripts. Several years ago, I switched the editorial model to sections, each led by a section editor. The rationale was that smaller sections could be conveniently reconfigured and staffed to address emerging needs. I also reduced the load on AEs to about one new manuscript per month, down from two or sometimes three papers per month. The idea was to afford AEs the time needed to ensure a highly rigorous peer review process. These changes were instituted with the complete understanding that uncompromising quality is the Journal’s only capital.

One of the secrets to the eminence of JSE is that the Journal is seamlessly integrated with the committee structure of ASCE’s Structural Engineering Institute (SEI). Because of this, AEs have access to the most knowledgeable reviewers in the world. Committee members are not only willing reviewers, they also have a stake in the success of the Journal because of its tight relationship with SEI. Not only that, but ASCE’s and SEI’s awards and the multimechanism nomination process that involves SEI committees make JSE a highly desirable venue and a place where authors dare send only their very best work. To further heighten the appeal of JSE, the board instituted a set of paper of the year awards that are given to the top three papers published in the Journal.

Among the many influential events in the past decade is our celebration in 2016 of the 60th anniversary of our name change to the Journal of Structural Engineering. Formerly known as the Journal of the Structural Division of the American Society of Civil Engineers, the Journal is actually about 150 years old. To mark that event, I commissioned a special collection of state-of-the-art papers written by top scholars in our field (El-Tawil 2018). These articles traced the history, projected the future, and articulated research needs for classical and emerging areas in the field. The 60th anniversary special collection is in addition to numerous others led by board members and members of our profession to address important and nascent areas in our discipline.

The JSE board meets once a year at the annual Structures Congress to review the previous year’s efforts and formulate a strategy for the upcoming year. The board typically discusses the Journal’s statistics and normally considers them an internal matter. I believe that readers may find instructive our statistics in Figs. 1–3. Fig. 1 shows the number of submissions and accepted manuscripts by area, while Fig. 2 shows the statistics by geographic location.

Fig. 2 clearly shows the rapid rise of submissions from China and hints that India is on its way to becoming a new scientific powerhouse, joining the club formed by the US, Western Europe, and China. Fig. 2 also shows how the acceptance rate varies geographically and the large discrepancies that occur based on the country of origin of the paper. Fig. 3(a) shows the sharp drop in acceptance rate over the past decade, while Fig. 3(b) shows the interesting trend that despite the strong growth in submission rate (Fig. 1), the board kept up with the deluge of papers by processing them faster [note the drop in processing time in Fig. 3(b)] the quicker they came in. This feat was accomplished without compromising technical paper quality.

It is with great pleasure that I announce that Professor John van de Lindt has been appointed by ASCE SEI as the new JSE editor in chief starting October 1, 2020 (Fig. 4). Professor van de Lindt has been associated with the Journal for a long time. He served as the AE for wood structures from 2009 to 2013. While serving as AE, he organized two successive special issues entitled “NEES Contributions to Earthquake Engineering,” which were published in 2013. Soon after he stepped down, he proposed a special issue titled “Seismic Resistant Timber Structures,” which was highly successful. In 2016, one year after finalizing the special issue, he proposed a another one titled “Structural Design and Robustness for Community Resilience to Natural Hazards.” This special issue was even more successful than the first and generated papers that are among our most highly cited. In 2018, Professor van de Lindt joined the board again as a section editor. Aside from his extensive editorial experience on the JSE board, Professor van de Lindt is a highly decorated author. He has received numerous awards from ASCE and was the inaugural recipient of JSE’s Paper of the Year Award. The recognition he has received and the exceptional papers he has written are assurances that he will maintain the extremely high standards for the Journal that I strived to maintain during my own tenure as editor in chief.

Over the last two plus decades, Professor van de Lindt’s research program has sought to improve the built environment by making structures and structural systems perform to the level expected by their occupants, government, and the public. This has been primarily through the development of performance-based engineering and test bed applications of building systems for earthquakes, hurricanes, tsunamis, tornadoes, and floods. To accomplish this has necessitated coupling nonlinear dynamics, including stochastic approaches with structural reliability during extreme loading events. His work includes both the development of new nonlinear numerical models and experimental investigations to calibrate those models and support hypotheses. He has led field studies following hurricanes, floods, earthquakes, and tornadoes to enable improvement in modeling at the structure and community level. Professor van de Lindt has led shake table tests on the world’s largest facilities in Miki, Japan, and San Diego, including the first-ever collapse of a full-scale soft-story wood frame building to validate collapse models. He currently serves as co-director of the NIST-funded Center for Risk-Based Community Resilience Planning seeking to couple structural and systems engineering, economics, and urban planning to improve the resilience of communities through combinations of retrofit and mitigation and socioeconomic-based policy.