Scientific Journals: Engineering’s Connection to the Outside World

Magazines are the main public exposure for engineers.

There are not a lot of ways for engineers to communicate their research and findings to the outside world. If your work isn’t mentioned in a periodical such as Motor Trend or other trending magazines then the odds are pretty great that it will not reach the eyes of the common reader. As a sort of trade-off, professional journals and publications have been started as a means of allowing engineers to get their research and findings out into print. This serves both as a means of sharing one’s findings in hopes that others will attempt to recreate and validate your results. The publishing of one’s results also serves as a sort of academic claim on your work. Tracking publication dates is one of the best ways to determine the origin of an idea or process so that credit can be correctly assigned for any benefit that may result from the work or research in the report. A journal article is not the same as a patent, but it at least gives an indication of where an idea originated from.

Writing an article for a scientific journal is sometimes regarded as one of the hardest parts of conducting engineering research. With topics as complex as thermodynamic processes and the regulation of heat transfer, it is often hard to put the use or analysis these concepts to print. An engineer writing a journal article must walk a fine line between being technical and communicating on a common literary level. The journal article that an engineer writes must be written simply enough that anybody could pick it up and read through it without getting a headache from technical jargon and complex formulas. However, the report must also contain enough information that an outside professional would be capable of reproducing your work in order to validate your findings. As you can see, this is a double edged sword for the writer. Attempting to walk this fine line is often what makes the writing of articles for publication such a daunting task for engineers. Boards of editors exist for these publications in order to assist engineers with the writing process, but the process most often takes several iterations before a report is deemed acceptable to be released to the public.

I am familiar with the struggle that is associated with attempting to get a paper into circulation because I too am attempting to get my work out to the public. I am currently in the process of writing a paper based on my capstone project for the American Society for Engineering Education. The society holds regional conferences e

The American Society for Engineering Education provides
an outlet for young engineers to share their work and research.

very year in order to provide engineering students of every discipline to display their projects and research for peer review and professional presentation. The conference requires that teams apply for a spot in the conference through the submission of an abstract of the project. The abstract serves as a general outline that states the purpose of the project and include few technical details in order to draw attention to the rest of the article. Once the abstract for the group has been approved, a paper must be drafted for review. A board of editors is assigned to review the drafts and suggest changes to be made before the submittal of the final draft. Once the final draft has been submitted, it is once again reviewed and placed into print for the conference. The conference then consists of a series of presentations about the projects that are featured in the lineup. The publications for each of the regional conferences are also published as a national publication for distribution both in print and online. However, the board is very particular as to what they expect to be in a paper before they publish it. There is only one review through the association, but that review often results in a laundry list of things to fix in order for the paper to ultimately be approved. Once the final draft is submitted, it is still possible for a paper to be denied publication if it is believed to be not written to the liking of the board. So between making sure all of your data and processes are documented, making sure your report is easily readable and appeasing a board of engineers and editors there is a lot associated with getting one’s work to a public platform. However, there is a lot at stake as well if your research or project is in a highly competitive field such as engineering. The first one to publish is often the one who gets the credit. It’s sort of like a more civilized and bland version of the hunger games, and the odds are usually never in your favor.