About Bauingenieur

Bauingenieur

Bauingenieur is Germany's longstanding peer-reviewed journal for civil and structural engineering, published by VDI Fachmedien in Düsseldorf. Founded in 1920 as Der Bauingenieur, it has served for more than a century as the official organ of the VDI's civil-engineering community — today the Fachbereich Bautechnik of the VDI-Gesellschaft Bauen und Gebäudetechnik (VDI-GBG). Appearing monthly (ten issues a year, with double issues in January/February and July/August), the journal addresses engineers and technicians in the construction industry with technical papers spanning structural concrete, steel construction, bridge engineering, tunnelling, and geotechnics, alongside new construction software and standards. What distinguishes it from the general construction press is its scientific standard: all main papers are peer-reviewed by specialists from the same discipline, and the journal is listed in the Science Citation Index Expanded and the Web of Science. With editor Michael Heeg and editor-in-chief Prof. Dr.-Ing. Christian Glock, it remains the profession's scholarly reference.

Overview

The civil-engineering journal is a particular genre: written by practitioners and researchers for practitioners and researchers, it advances the profession's state of knowledge rather than merely reporting it. Bauingenieur occupies this genre's German center. Its readership consists of structural and civil engineers, technicians, and decision-makers in engineering offices, construction companies, research institutions, and public building authorities — a target group that is, as the publisher notes, largely composed of decision-makers, which also makes the journal an attractive advertising medium for construction-industry companies.

The editorial program combines the scholarly and the practical. The main papers — the peer-reviewed core — treat topics from the theory and practice of structural engineering: mechanics and geotechnics, structural concrete (Massivbau), steel construction, bridge building, tunnelling, construction operations and management. Reports on interesting construction executions and extraordinary building renovations in Germany and abroad provide the practice-oriented counterpoint and, as the publisher describes it, form the starting point of the journal's practice orientation. Forward-looking developments round out the spectrum. Because the audience makes project decisions, the journal supplies specialist information directly applicable to their building projects — dimensioning approaches, design databases, construction methods, and normative developments.

The journal's institutional role extends beyond its pages: as the official organ of the VDI Fachbereich Bautechnik, it is the profession's communication channel, publishing the society's matters and the discipline's discourse. Its citation-index listing gives the peer-reviewed papers scholarly currency beyond the German-speaking engineering community.

History

Bauingenieur was founded in 1920 as Der Bauingenieur, succeeding the earlier periodical Armierter Beton — placing its origins in the Weimar Republic's engineering culture, when reinforced concrete was transforming construction. The journal was published by Springer-Verlag, establishing the long Springer association that the current row's website (link.springer.com) still echoes. Through the interwar years, the Nazi era, and the post-war reconstruction — the decades when German civil engineering rebuilt the country's infrastructure — the journal documented the discipline's knowledge. Its pre-war bibliographic record confirms the title's scholarly standing: the journal appeared as the "Zeitschrift für das gesamte Bauwesen" (journal for the entire construction field), carrying communications of the German standards committee and serving as the organ of the harbor-construction technical society — the professional institutions of the building world anchored their discourse in its pages. The post-war decades brought the journal's second great subject: the reconstruction and then the infrastructure expansion of the Federal Republic, the autobahns, bridges, and industrial structures whose engineering the journal's papers analyzed. The reinforced-concrete lineage — from the predecessor Armierter Beton through the ultra-high-performance concrete research of the present — runs as a continuous thread through the century: the material that founded the journal remains at the center of its technical discourse, now in its steel-fiber-reinforced ultra-high-performance form.

A decisive publishing chapter came in 1997, when VDI Fachmedien was founded as Springer-VDI-Verlag, a joint venture of the Springer publishing house and the VDI Verlag. The journal moved into this specialist house, aligning the profession's journal with the profession's publisher. At the turn of 2018/2019, the VDI Verlag took over all shares held by Springer Nature and renamed the publishing house VDI Fachmedien — the journal has since appeared in the engineers' own publishing house. The VDI-GBG's formation consolidated the journal's institutional home: it is one of the two specialist organs of the VDI-Gesellschaft Bauen und Gebäudetechnik (alongside HLH), serving its civil-engineering members. Structurae's periodical database records the unbroken run of volumes from the 1920s through volume 100 in 2025 — a century of continuous publication.

Coverage and Content

Each issue's program reflects the structural-engineering discipline's breadth. The peer-reviewed main papers — written by leading experts in their respective fields — address the discipline's analytical core: recent examples from the eLibrary include the shear design of girders made of steel-fiber-reinforced ultra-high-performance concrete, with design approaches and databases. The Massivbau and Stahlbau coverage treats the two dominant structural materials' design theory and application; the Brückenbau and Tunnelbau sections cover the signature infrastructure disciplines; the Geotechnik coverage addresses foundation engineering and soil mechanics; the construction-software and standards coverage keeps the practitioners current with the tools and the normative framework.

The practice reports — the interesting construction executions and extraordinary renovations — give the journal its engineering-site dimension: how the signature structures were actually built, what the exceptional rehabilitations demanded. The VDI-matters sections carry the profession's organizational communication. The forward-looking developments — sustainability, digitalization, resource efficiency — position the discipline's research frontier. The 2015 impact factor of 0.866, modest by the natural sciences' standards but meaningful in the applied-engineering journal landscape, reflects the papers' citation currency.

Organization and Ownership

Bauingenieur is published by VDI Fachmedien GmbH & Co. KG, the Düsseldorf-based specialist publishing house for engineering journals, seated at VDI-Platz 1 in Düsseldorf and led by Ken Fouhy. VDI Fachmedien's portfolio — alongside Bauingenieur, the titles Gefahrstoffe, HLH, Konstruktion, Lärmbekämpfung, Logistik für Unternehmen, Technische Sicherheit, VDI-Z Integrierte Produktion, and VDI Energie + Umwelt — makes it the VDI's publishing arm. The journal's editor (Chefredakteur) is Michael Heeg; the Herausgeber is Prof. Dr.-Ing. Christian Glock.

Institutionally, the journal belongs to the VDI-Gesellschaft Bauen und Gebäudetechnik (VDI-GBG), the VDI's specialist society for architecture, civil engineering, building services, and facility management, whose network encompasses some 17,000 of the VDI's roughly 150,000 members, supported regionally by the 45 VDI district associations. The VDI-GBG, publisher of around 200 VDI guidelines developed in voluntary collaborative work, uses the journal as one of its two specialist organs. Commercially, the journal follows the scholarly-press model: subscriptions (institutional and personal), plus advertising from the construction industry's companies targeting the decision-maker readership.

Digital Presence

The journal's digital home within the VDI's ingenieur.de portal (ingenieur.de/fachmedien/bauingenieur) presents the title, its program, and subscription information, while the VDI Verlag eLibrary (elibrary.vdi-verlag.de) provides the digital document infrastructure — searchable, browsable issues with downloadable papers, the digital continuation of the century-old volume run. The row's link.springer.com reflects the journal's long Springer publishing history. The eLibrary's search and document-view functions serve the scholarly use: researchers and practitioners can search within the journal's archive for the peer-reviewed papers.

The digital strategy follows the scholarly-journal logic: the print issues for the profession's curated reading, the eLibrary for the citable paper archive and the full-text search. After more than a century — from the 1920 founding as Der Bauingenieur through the Springer decades, the Springer-VDI joint venture, and the VDI Fachmedien era — Bauingenieur operates as German civil engineering's scholarly journal: the peer-reviewed papers advancing the discipline, the practice reports grounding it in the built work, and the VDI's institutional voice — in print and in the eLibrary, ten issues a year.