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Axiomatic Design Friendly Journals/Conferences

Written by Mary Kathryn Thompson mktkaist AT gmail DOT com

There have been discussions at the past few ICADs about where AD related research is being published, how to increase our opportunities to publish AD related research, and how to increase the quality, visibility, and value of those publications.

Improving Conference Proceedings

Part of our effort to address this involved moving the ICAD proceedings Elsevier's Procedia. As a result, our conference papers are now indexed, open access, and more visible than before. The next step is to address journal publications in the community.

AD Related Journals

At the beginning of this year I did a Google Scholar search for the top 104 journal articles related to Axiomatic Design. I have attached an Excel spreadsheet with those findings. In general, I found that the top four journals that publish work related to or that mention AD are:

  • Research in engineering design (15)
  • CIRP Annals (10)
  • Journal of Engineering Design (7)
  • Journal of Mechanical Design (7)
  • All other journals had only 5 instances of AD related work or less.

Many of the articles in RiED were either review articles that mention but do not use or build on AD or that criticize or compare AD to another technique that is the true focus of the work. Publication in the CIRP Annals is by invitation only. Many of the smaller numbers of papers published in the domain journals are submitted by clusters of the same authors. Thus these journals may not be "friendly" to the AD community but friendly to members of their communities who also happen to do AD related work.

This leaves the Journal of Engineering Design and the ASME Journal of Mechanical Design as the best options for the AD community. They both have very good editorials teams who understand and appreciate our work and would be supportive of more contributions from our community.

I have spoken more to Alex Duffy at JED about this issue and he has been wonderful. Therefore, I propose that at least for now we explore having JED be the unofficial home of AD archival research.

Unofficial "Special Issues" in JED

For the past year or so we have been discussing the idea of having an 'unofficial' special issue for AD related work in the Journal of Engineering Design.

For an 'unofficial' special issue, ICAD authors would submit extended versions of their papers to JED at approximately the same time. They will go through the regular review process. They will be published in regular issues. But if they come in at about the same time, the editorial team will be able to look at them as a group and to give us feedback as a community. (If at another time, we wish to organize a special issue on engineering design theory and methodology in a broader sense, they would be willing to discuss that too.)

I therefore propose that anyone who wants to should consider extending their ICAD submission or another AD related conference paper or writing a new AD related paper for the Journal of Engineering design. Papers that were recognized at ICAD 2015 should feel especially welcome to participate.

These papers:

  • Should be completely new or a significant extension of previous work (at least 30% new material)
  • Should be true revisions
    • Should have revised titles, abstracts, introductory paragraphs, etc. to differentiate them from the original version
    • Small changes to repeated figures, tables, and other attempts to avoid pure republication should also be made
  • Should be ready for publication in an archival journal (i.e the research should be done)
  • Should have content that is and is shown to be correct, new, and useful (as with any engineering design article).
  • Should be written for a more general engineering design audience (not AD experts)
    • This might involve putting more background in
    • This probably also involves an extended literature review including papers that have been published in JED
  • Should be accompanied by a letter to the editor that clearly identifies
    • The fact that this was originally published as a conference paper
    • That the authors wish to be part of the unofficial special issue
    • What changes have been made to the new version to justify (re)publication
  • Should aim for a submission before Dec. 15, 2015.

To support this effort, I have created a DropBox folder that contains some examples of AD related papers in JED and a before-and-after paper from ICAD 2011 that had an extended version published in JED. You can find all of that material here:

An easy way to revise and extend is to add another author. This will allow the work to be seen through a new set of eyes and should automatically add new contributions. This is also a good way to build relationships within the community.

Adding an extended, an additional, or a new case study is also an easy way to build on your existing work.

Please note that for some ICAD 2015 authors, 'revision' will actually involve trying to do less in one paper, instead going deeper into one aspect of the paper and doing it better.

Please let me know if you intend to submit or actually submit a revised paper to JED.

Please also let me know if you have any questions or need any additional information.

Updated by Joseph Foley over 8 years ago · 6 revisions