News

You can find papers from relatively recent conferences here.

NHERI CGM Workshop presentations can be found here.

Make sure you are always up to date

When on campus internet or anywhere else via VPN you have unlimited access to online journals. More of than not, you will know who is working on what, whose papers to look for, and of course track the references of a paper you read/liked/found useful. At other times, you will simply go to Google, type your topic and see what has been published. It is equally important that you stay up to date with “fresh out of the oven” publications… to do that, make sure you go to Journals of interest and subscribe to their weekly alerts of new publications (e.g. ASCE JGGE and many more, Elsevier Soil Dynamics and Earthquake Engineering, Canadian Geotechnical Journal, International Journal for Numerical Methods in Engineering, ICE Geotechnique, Geotechnique Letter, Computers and Geotechnics, Soils and Foundations etc.)

Starting your Literature Review

Create a Zotero account and join our Zotero Group (kz_geotech). Download Zotero and Zotero plugin for word, and Zotero plugin for google chrome. Make sure you get familiar with this incredibly useful software (how it works with Word docs, clipping articles on your web browser, adding tags etc.).

Formulate your Work and Goals to serve a Hypothesis

Getting the most out of what you read

• Be organized
• Be critical
• Be efficient – only read what you need to
  • Start by reading only the abstract and conclusion, scanning figures & tables, and looking at their references.
  • Read the other sections only if the paper seems relevant or you think it may help you get a different perspective
  • Skip the sections that you already understand (often the background and motivation sections)
• Take notes on every paper you find worth reading
  • What problem are they trying to solve?
  • What is their approach? How would you have done it?
  • How is it different from other approaches?
• Summarize what you have read on each topic – after you have read several papers covering some topic, note the:
  • key problems
  • various formulations of the problem they are addressing
  • relationship among the various approaches
  • alternative approaches

Modified from Prof. Shealy and from the Graduate School Survival Guide

Also, take a look at this presentation and prepare to discuss during our group meetings.