About Earthquake Engineering and Engineering Vibration

Earthquake Engineering and Engineering Vibration

Earthquake Engineering and Engineering Vibration is an English-language journal published by Springer in association with the Institute of Engineering Mechanics (IEM) of the China Earthquake Administration in Harbin, Heilongjiang province. Founded in 2002 as the institute's international journal, it publishes research on seismology applied to engineering, strong-motion studies, seismic hazard and risk, earthquake-resistant design, structural vibration control and lifeline engineering. It appears quarterly, at four issues a year, with print ISSN 1671-3664 and online ISSN 1993-503X, and the Institute of Engineering Mechanics is its publisher of record. The Harbin institute behind it — founded in 1954 — is historically China's centre for earthquake engineering, described in institutional accounts as the country's earliest and biggest research institute in the field and as a talent base for the discipline. The journal carries that research tradition to an international audience in English, alongside the institute's Chinese-language publishing.

A note on dates is needed, because bibliographic databases can mislead a quick reader. Scopus-based listings give the journal a coverage history that includes scattered years in the 1980s and early 1990s as well as an unbroken run from 2002. Those earlier entries reflect the institute's related publishing history recorded by the databases. The present English-language journal under this title dates from 2002, and that is the founding date used by its own descriptions and by this profile. What began in 2002 was not earthquake engineering in Harbin — that was almost half a century old — but a dedicated English channel for it.

The Institute of Engineering Mechanics in Harbin

The Institute of Engineering Mechanics was formally established in 1954 under the Chinese Academy of Sciences, according to institutional histories. In 1984 it was renamed the Institute of Engineering Mechanics of the China Seismological Bureau — the administration now known as the China Earthquake Administration. It is described as the biggest and oldest research institute in China conducting research on earthquake engineering and engineering seismology, and an introduction hosted by an international disaster-risk knowledge service calls it the earliest research institute for earthquake engineering, protection engineering and geotechnical engineering in China, hailed as China's earthquake engineering talent base.

Since its founding, in that account, the institute was the pioneer in China in the various branches of earthquake-engineering research, carrying out the country's first strong-earthquake observation work and early work on earthquake damage prediction, earthquake simulation testing, seismic design standards and engineering vibration measurement. Since the beginning of the 1970s, institutional histories add, it focused its main efforts further on earthquake engineering and safety engineering. Its academic structure reflects that breadth, with doctoral work in civil-engineering fields including structural engineering, geotechnical engineering and disaster prevention and mitigation and protection engineering. A quarterly English journal from such an institute is therefore a window on a whole national discipline, not on a single laboratory.

Why an English journal in 2002

By 2002 Chinese earthquake engineering had accumulated decades of experience that was poorly visible abroad. The development of the field in China is commonly described in three stages: an initial stage in the 1950s and 1960s, when earthquake engineering was specified as a branch in the first national twelve-year plan of science and technology, IEM was an important participant, and the first earthquake zonation map and first seismic design code were completed; a second stage from the 1960s to the 1980s, marked by strong earthquakes from which many lessons were learned — strong-motion observation on ground and structures in China started in the early 1960s, mostly in regions of recent strong earthquakes such as Xingtai in 1966, Tonghai in 1970 and Tangshan in 1976 — and a third stage from the 1980s onward, marked by national disaster-management law and codes for hazard evaluation, zonation and the strengthening of existing structures.

Much of that experience was published in Chinese. An English journal published with Springer gave Harbin a regular, indexed way to present Chinese strong-motion data, post-earthquake damage investigation, code-related research and vibration-control work to the international earthquake-engineering community — and to receive that community's work in return. The journal's founding in 2002, alongside its institute's Chinese-language sister titles, belongs to the same early-2000s generation of English launches through which Chinese research institutes internationalised their publishing.

Scope: from seismology to structures

The journal's title states its two halves. Earthquake engineering covers the effect of earthquakes on the built environment: seismology applied to engineering, strong-motion characteristics, seismic hazard and risk assessment, the seismic behaviour and design of buildings, bridges and other infrastructure, geotechnical earthquake engineering and lifeline systems such as transport and utility networks. Engineering vibration covers the wider dynamics of structures under vibration — including vibration control — whether the excitation is seismic or comes from other sources.

Its candidate and journal descriptions list, in particular, strong-motion studies, seismic hazard and risk, earthquake-resistant design, structural vibration control and lifeline engineering. Bibliometric topic analyses of its contents converge on the same picture: structural engineering is the dominant area, followed by geotechnical engineering, with recurring work on seismic analysis, stiffness, earthquake shaking-table testing, dampers and earthquake engineering more generally, and on soil-structure interaction where geotechnical work meets seismology. The journal aims, in summary descriptions of its scope, to advance earthquake engineering and structural dynamics through research on the seismic behaviour of structures, materials and systems under seismic loading, contributing to safer and more resilient infrastructure.

Strong motion, hazard and risk

Strong-motion research is foundational to everything else the journal publishes, because design and analysis are only as good as the ground-motion knowledge behind them. The sponsoring institute's history is bound up with this work: it carried out China's first strong-earthquake observation, and the China Strong Motion Network Center is affiliated to IEM, as exchange-programme descriptions from the institute note, with strong-motion topics including data acquisition and processing, station soil classification, attenuation relationships in China and site-effect analysis based on strong-motion data.

Papers on seismic hazard and risk turn that observational base into assessments that codes and planners can use: how large an earthquake may occur, how ground motion attenuates and is modified by local soil, what damage a building stock or a network may suffer, and how losses can be predicted. Earthquake-damage prediction was, in the institute's own history, one of the branches it pioneered in China, and the journal provides the English-language outlet through which that Harbin tradition — hazard, vulnerability and risk treated together — reaches international readers.

Earthquake-resistant design and structural vibration control

The engineering core of the journal is how structures are made to survive earthquakes. That includes seismic analysis and design of buildings and bridges, experimental work such as shaking-table tests, numerical methods including finite-element analysis, and the devices and systems that modify a structure's response: dampers, isolation and vibration-control systems. Topic listings for the journal single out damper and vibration-control research, connected to control theory, and work on modal identification and structural damage detection — the problem of telling, from a structure's vibration response, whether and where it has been damaged.

Among the journal's most cited papers in research listings are a study of output-only modal identification and structural damage detection using time-frequency and wavelet techniques, and work on a three-dimensional viscous-spring artificial boundary in the time domain — a computational method for modelling how seismic waves interact with the ground and foundations. Those examples show the journal's range within its core: from sensor-based monitoring of real structures to the boundary conditions of a numerical model, both in service of the same question of how built structures behave when the ground moves.

The Wenchuan earthquake and damage investigation

Post-earthquake field investigation is one of the oldest functions of the Harbin institute, and the journal's record contains a notable example. Research listings identify among its most cited papers a study titled, in those listings, Seismic damage of highway bridges during the 2008 Wenchuan earthquake. The Wenchuan earthquake devastated parts of Sichuan in 2008, and systematic documentation of how highway bridges — lifeline structures on which rescue and recovery depended — were damaged is exactly the kind of evidence that changes later design practice.

That paper's prominence illustrates the journal's lifeline-engineering strand. Lifelines — highways, bridges, railways, water, power and communications systems — must not only avoid collapse themselves; their failure compounds a disaster by cutting off the response. A journal that publishes bridge-damage investigation alongside seismic design, geotechnical engineering and hazard analysis treats an earthquake as a systems event, which is how the institute in Harbin has approached the subject since the lessons drawn from the strong Chinese earthquakes of the 1960s and 1970s.

Geotechnical earthquake engineering and lifelines

A substantial share of the journal's content is geotechnical. Listings place geotechnical engineering second only to structural engineering among its research topics, and its categories in Scopus-based rankings include geotechnical engineering and engineering geology and geophysics alongside civil and structural engineering. Soil behaviour during earthquakes — site effects, soil-structure interaction, ground failure — determines the motion that actually reaches a structure and can destroy foundations and buried lifelines even where above-ground design is sound.

The institute's experimental infrastructure supports this strand. The Institute of Engineering Mechanics hosts a Center for Geotechnical Centrifuge Modelling, providing national and international users access to a 5.5-metre-radius geotechnical centrifuge for research on the performance of soil and soil-structure systems under earthquake and other loading, according to the centre's own description. Centrifuge modelling, shaking-table research and strong-motion observation together give the Harbin community the three experimental legs of earthquake engineering — field records, large structural tests and scaled soil models — and the journal publishes across all of them.

Publishing, peer review and indexing

Earthquake Engineering and Engineering Vibration is published quarterly, four issues a year, by Springer in association with the institute, with the Institute of Engineering Mechanics named as publisher in bibliographic listings. Its print ISSN is 1671-3664 and its electronic ISSN is 1993-503X. Springer's ethics and disclosures page for the journal states that its research content is peer reviewed on a single-anonymous basis and that the journal is a member of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) and maintains a competing-interest policy — the standard Springer Nature framework applied to a Chinese institute journal.

Indexing listings record the journal in the Science Citation Index Expanded, and Scopus-based rankings place it in the first quartile in categories including Building and Construction, Civil and Structural Engineering, Geophysics, Geotechnical Engineering and Engineering Geology, and Mechanical Engineering. Quartiles vary by year and by source, and this profile does not attach a specific impact-factor figure to the title; the durable points are its SCIE and Scopus presence, its Springer distribution and its standing as the English journal of China's principal earthquake-engineering institute. Bibliometric listings also show its leading author affiliations to be exactly what its provenance predicts — the China Earthquake Administration community first, followed by major Chinese civil-engineering universities such as Tongji University and Harbin Institute of Technology.

Harbin and Heilongjiang as a base

It may seem surprising that China's earthquake-engineering centre sits in Harbin, in the far northeast, far from the country's most destructive earthquake zones in the north China plain, the southwest and the northwest. The location is a product of the institute's 1954 founding under the Chinese Academy of Sciences and of Harbin's mid-twentieth-century strength in engineering education and research — a strength still visible in the journal's close bibliometric association with Harbin Institute of Technology. Earthquake engineering is a national function: the institute observes strong motion, investigates damage and informs codes for the whole country from its Heilongjiang base, and its English journal does the same for an international readership.

For the World News Media directory, that geography is the point of cataloguing the journal under Harbin, Heilongjiang. China's international scientific publishing is often associated with Beijing and Shanghai, but some of its most specialised and consequential titles are published from institute cities chosen in the 1950s. Earthquake Engineering and Engineering Vibration is one of them.

The journal today

Earthquake Engineering and Engineering Vibration continues as a quarterly English journal from Harbin, more than two decades after its 2002 founding, publishing peer-reviewed research for the international earthquake-engineering and structural-dynamics community through Springer. Its agenda — strong motion, hazard and risk, resistant design, vibration control, geotechnical earthquake engineering and lifelines — has lost none of its urgency in a century in which damaging earthquakes continue to test building stocks and infrastructure networks across Asia and the world.

The essential record for directory readers is compact: founded in 2002 as the international journal of the Institute of Engineering Mechanics of the China Earthquake Administration in Harbin; quarterly in English; print ISSN 1671-3664 and online ISSN 1993-503X; publisher of record the Institute of Engineering Mechanics, published in association with Springer; peer reviewed and indexed internationally; and rooted in an institute founded in 1954 that institutional accounts describe as China's earliest, biggest and most central home of earthquake-engineering research.