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The OpenSees WCEE Bump

Original Post - 28 Jun 2024 - Michael H. Scott

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The 18th World Conference on Earthquake Engineering (18WCEE) takes place in Milan next week. With a couple thousand attendees, the conference will publish a lot of papers, some of which refer to OpenSees.

Depending on how WCEE authors cite their use of OpenSees, there’s usually a bump in OpenSees citations after the proceedings are posted online. But the bump in citations is difficult to measure.

However, the number of WCEE papers that have referred to OpenSees is a good proxy for quantifying the citation bump.

Using Google Scholar’s advanced search, we can see the history of WCEE papers that contain the word “OpenSees”. As shown in the screen shot below, we can narrow Google Scholar’s search to “OpenSees” papers published in “World Conference on Earthquake Engineering” over a specific date range.

The plot below shows the cumulative number of OpenSees WCEE papers, obtained by changing the end year in the advanced search shown above.

As expected, the number of papers bumps up every four years, with some caveats.

• There were no OpenSees WCEE papers prior to 13WCEE in 2004. A search for G3 papers in the 12WCEE turned up nothing.
• The bump for 16WCEE occurs in 2017 because the event was held in January 2017 instead of summer 2016. Historically, winter of the +1 year is not uncommon for WCEEs hosted in the southern hemisphere.
• Due to the COVID-induced one year delay, the 17WCEE bump spans 2020 and 2021. Google Scholar picks up the papers authors posted on ResearchGate or personal servers in 2020, as well as the “official” post-conference postings. Google Scholar does a very good job of not counting duplicates.

Where will we end up after the papers from 18WCEE are posted online later this year and then indexed by Google Scholar? What’s the over-under on the cumulative total? With the wider adoption of OpenSeesPy and all the applications therein, I bet we surpass 600 papers.

What do you think?