Journal of Engineering Research

About Journal of Engineering Research

Journal of Engineering Research — Journal Profile

The Journal of Engineering Research, known everywhere by its acronym TJER, is the engineering journal of Sultan Qaboos University in Muscat, Oman. It was established in 2004 as an international, peer-reviewed, open access journal, and it publishes applied and fundamental research across the breadth of engineering. Its print ISSN is 1726-6009 and its electronic ISSN is 1726-6742, the pair carried by this JournalsWorld record and confirmed in the journal's Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) listing, which names Sultan Qaboos University as publisher and Oman as the country of publication.

The unadorned title is shared by several unrelated journals in other countries — a point this profile returns to below, because it causes real confusion in citation databases — but the Oman journal is unambiguous once its identifiers are used: TJER, Sultan Qaboos University, ISSNs 1726-6009 and 1726-6742. Within those identifiers sits a journal with a clear and creditable record: two issues a year, a Scopus listing earned in 2009, a stated policy of never charging authors publication fees, funding solely from its university, and, by its own published figure, an acceptance rate of 6.8 percent, which makes it one of the more demanding general engineering journals in its region. For engineers in the Gulf and beyond who want their work read by a genuinely international audience without paying for the privilege, TJER is a serious option that repays a close look.

History and identity

The journal's own history page gives the spine of the story. TJER was established in 2004 by Sultan Qaboos University as an open access journal for high-quality research across the engineering disciplines, and it has kept a broad scope from its inception. It was initially hosted on the Open Journal Systems (OJS) platform — its OJS home at Sultan Qaboos University's journals portal is the address its DOAJ record still gives — and in 2009 it reached the milestone of indexing in Scopus, which lifted its visibility in the global research community. Over the following years it widened its international reach, working with engineering conferences worldwide and drawing submissions from authors in many countries. In 2025 the journal moved to the Digital Commons platform hosted by Elsevier, strengthening its infrastructure and editorial capabilities. Throughout, it has been solely funded and supported by Sultan Qaboos University, a fact the journal itself presents as a guarantee of freedom from commercial influence.

Two features of that history deserve emphasis. The first is the fee policy: the journal states that it has never charged publication fees to authors, and DOAJ's record independently confirms that it has no article processing charges. In a market where open access engineering journals routinely charge four-figure sums, a university-funded journal that has held a no-fee line for two decades is a distinctive institution, and it shapes the journal's authorship, which includes many researchers from institutions that could not pay commercial rates. The second is continuity of scope. TJER has resisted the fashion for ever-narrower specialisation: it remains a general engineering journal in the classic mould, one title under one university, publishing the disciplines its university teaches and practises.

One more standing feature deserves a sentence of its own: the journal states that it works with engineering conferences worldwide and draws submissions from authors across different countries, and its two-decades run under a single publisher gives departments and ministries in the region a stable place to send work that must be refereed properly, published openly and kept permanently. Stability of that kind is easy to overlook in a directory listing and hard to replace once lost.

Scope and subjects

TJER's stated aim is to provide a medium through which engineering researchers and scholars worldwide can publish scholarly applied and fundamental research, and to highlight research and development leading to innovative solutions across the engineering disciplines. Its current aims and scope page organises that breadth into five priority areas. Energy and environmental engineering: renewable energy technologies, clean energy conversion, energy storage, sustainable power grids, climate change adaptation, environmental impact mitigation and green engineering. Mechanical and thermal engineering: fluid dynamics, heat transfer, thermodynamics, mechanical systems optimisation, advanced materials, nanotechnology applications. Civil and structural engineering: earthquake-resistant design, smart materials for sustainable construction, geotechnical and foundation engineering, resilient urban infrastructure. Electrical and electronic engineering: embedded systems, power electronics, grid optimisation, control theory, sensor networks and the internet of things. Artificial intelligence and computational engineering: AI-driven engineering processes, digital twin technology, machine learning for engineering optimisation, computational fluid dynamics and AI-supported decision-making in design, production and monitoring. The journal's summary descriptions add the discipline list its two issues draw on each year — architecture, chemical, civil, electrical, environmental, industrial, materials, mechanical and petroleum engineering — and DOAJ classifies it under Engineering (General) and Civil Engineering (General), with keywords of engineering, applied engineering, theoretical engineering and engineering research.

The journal welcomes original research articles, review articles and case studies. Articles are published in English, with an Arabic translation of the abstract to serve readers in the region — a small feature that says much about the journal's dual address, international in ambition and Omani in home. Worked examples of its centre of gravity are easy to find in its citation profile: building energy and comfort optimisation, geotechnical and construction materials studies, the structural behaviour of reinforced concrete, and asphalt pavement performance all rank among its most characteristic topics in OpenAlex's analysis, reflecting the construction and infrastructure questions of a fast-built Gulf state alongside the universal concerns of the profession.

Publisher, editors and editorial practice

The publisher is Sultan Qaboos University, Oman's national university, whose address the journal gives as the Al Khoud District, Muscat, Postal Code 123; the journal has been funded and supported by the university throughout its life. This directory's stored record showed only a numeric publisher code (4557); the verified publisher is Sultan Qaboos University. The journal's about page names its editorial office contact and gives the acceptance rate of 6.8 percent quoted above — a figure authors should sit with, since it implies that roughly fourteen of every fifteen submissions are turned away, and that a manuscript needs to be plainly in scope, technically sound and clearly written to survive. Current editor names are best taken from the journal's own site, since editorial offices change and this profile does not guess at them.

Editorially, the journal states that it adheres to the principles of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) and follows its code of conduct, and both the journal's own summary and DOAJ describe a double-blind (double anonymous) review process, in which authors and reviewers are anonymous to each other. DOAJ additionally records that the journal operates plagiarism screening. Articles receive DOIs through Crossref, and the journal is preserved in the CLOCKSS and Portico archives, the two leading preservation services, which is the detail that guarantees the archive's long-term survival regardless of platform changes — a guarantee the journal's 2025 platform move makes concrete rather than theoretical. DOAJ gives the journal's typical publication time as twelve weeks.

Metrics and standing

OpenAlex's source record for the journal, resolved through its ISSN endpoint at checking time and carrying exactly this journal's ISSN pair, records 573 works, 2,422 citations and an h-index of 20, with a two-year mean citedness of about 0.82. One caution belongs with those numbers: OpenAlex's coverage window for the record reaches back before the journal's 2004 founding, so its totals should be read as the database's aggregation for the title rather than a clean census of the journal since 2004 — a common artefact where a title has namesakes and predecessors in the data. Secondary SCImago summaries based on Scopus have placed the journal in the fourth quartile (Q4) in Engineering (miscellaneous), consistent with this directory's stored template data. The honest summary is that TJER is a mid-sized, genuinely international general engineering journal: not a high-impact-factor title — it does not claim a Journal Impact Factor, and readers should distrust any site that quotes one for it without naming its source — but a Scopus-indexed, university-backed venue whose papers accumulate steady citations in construction, materials, energy and geotechnical research.

Indexing and access — and a necessary word about namesakes

The journal's own indexing list, from its about page, reads: Scopus, Google Scholar, DOAJ, Crossref, EBSCO, J-Gate, LOCKSS, Al Manhal and the ISC Master Journals List, with ScienceGate also named on the page. The DOAJ listing was verified directly for this profile: it confirms both ISSNs, the Sultan Qaboos University publisher, English as the language, open access since 2004, a Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) licence, double anonymous review, plagiarism screening, authors retaining copyright, and no article processing charges. Access is immediate and free: TJER is an open access journal in the full sense, and there are no author fees at the other end either.

Because the title is generic, authors and readers must separate TJER from its namesakes with care. The Journal of Engineering Research published by Kuwait University (print ISSN 2307-1877, online ISSN 2307-1885, publishing since 2013) is a different journal; so is the Journal of Engineering Research — Egypt, published by the Faculty of Engineering at Tanta University (print ISSN 2356-9441, online ISSN 2735-4873). Both of those journals' JournalsWorld profiles discuss the Oman title only to distinguish themselves from it, and metrics, rankings or editorial details attached to their ISSNs do not belong to TJER, just as TJER's do not belong to them. The rule is simple and worth printing on every reading list: for this title, trust the ISSN, never the name alone.

The namesakes in detail

The Kuwait namesake rewards a closer look, because its profile in this directory explains exactly how the confusion arises and how it is resolved. The Journal of Engineering Research published by Kuwait University's Academic Publication Council began with a first issue on 18 June 2013, when Kuwait University divided its earlier Kuwait Journal of Science and Engineering into separate science and engineering journals following a 2011 decision. It is a quarterly journal, in English and Arabic, whose own identifiers — print ISSN 2307-1877 and online ISSN 2307-1885 — appear on its official site, and whose profile in this directory treats its transliterated Arabic title and its English title as one journal. That profile is explicit about the boundary this profile is drawing: 2307-1877 and 2307-1885 belong to Kuwait; 1726-6009 and 1726-6742 belong to Oman. The Egyptian namesake is equally well documented. The Journal of Engineering Research — Egypt, abbreviated ERJ, is the quarterly journal of the Faculty of Engineering at Tanta University, published through the Egyptian Knowledge Bank's journals platform under print ISSN 2356-9441 and online ISSN 2735-4873, and its registered title carries the country suffix precisely because the plain title is shared. Its profile likewise warns that metrics attached to the Kuwaiti or Omani ISSNs are not metrics for the Egyptian journal. Three journals, three countries, three universities, one title: the ISSN is the only safe key, and every database entry, ranking table or citation that omits it should be treated as unidentified until the ISSN is traced.

Reading TJER well

For readers, TJER rewards being read as what it is: a national university's general engineering journal with international ambitions and a regional accent in its subject matter. Its construction, geotechnical, water and energy papers speak to the conditions of Oman and the Gulf — high temperatures, aggressive exposure environments, rapid infrastructure growth, desalination-era water questions — and that regional grounding is a strength for any researcher working on arid-region engineering, because the journal's authors test materials and methods where those conditions are the everyday case rather than an accelerated laboratory simulation. Its electrical, computing and artificial intelligence papers connect the same institution to the newer disciplines, and its review articles give entrants a way into a sub-field through the eyes of the Sultan Qaboos University community. The Arabic abstract translations make every paper at least partly legible to Arabic-reading engineers in the region's ministries and consultancies, a readership most English-only journals never reach. And the preservation arrangements — CLOCKSS and Portico archiving, Crossref DOIs, and a platform migration in 2025 that carried the journal onto Digital Commons without breaking its identity — mean that a citation to TJER is a citation to something built to last. Researchers building a reading list or a literature review in Gulf-region engineering will find the journal most useful when they cite it by its full identification — The Journal of Engineering Research (TJER), Sultan Qaboos University, ISSN 1726-6742 for the online edition — so that their own readers are never sent to Kuwait or Tanta by mistake.

How to submit

Submissions are made through the journal's own site — now on its Digital Commons platform, with its earlier OJS portal at Sultan Qaboos University still the address in its DOAJ record — and authors should follow the submission instructions and aims and scope statement given there. Prepare the manuscript in English, and provide the material the journal needs to produce the Arabic abstract translation in its house style. Given the published acceptance rate, the strongest practical advice is about fit and finish: the paper should sit squarely inside one of the journal's named areas, state its engineering contribution in the first page, and report methods, data and validation to a standard that lets a specialist referee check the work. Review articles and case studies are welcomed alongside original research, but the same test applies — a review must organise a field, not merely list it, and a case study must teach something transferable. There are no submission or publication fees to budget for, which removes one calculation entirely; the calculation that remains is whether the work is good enough for a journal that accepts fewer than seven papers in every hundred it receives.

Related journals

Engineers weighing TJER against neighbouring venues will usually compare it with other university-based general engineering journals in the region and with the specialist titles in their own sub-field: the Kuwait Journal of Engineering Research namesake discussed above for Gulf-region general engineering; journals of the region's engineering societies and universities in civil, mechanical and energy engineering; and internationally, broad-scope open access engineering journals whose remit matches TJER's. The comparisons that matter are concrete — indexing, fees, review model, turnaround and readership — and on those concrete points TJER's published record (Scopus since 2009, no fees at any point, double-blind review, twelve-week typical publication time in DOAJ's record) is unusually easy to verify, which is itself a reason authors trust it.

Frequently asked questions

What are the ISSNs of The Journal of Engineering Research (TJER)?

The print ISSN is 1726-6009 and the electronic ISSN is 1726-6742, confirmed in the journal's DOAJ listing. Other journals share this title; only this ISSN pair identifies the Sultan Qaboos University journal.

Who publishes TJER, and where?

Sultan Qaboos University, at Al Khoud District, Muscat, Oman (Postal Code 123). The journal has been funded solely by the university since 2004. The numeric code 4557 in this directory's older data is not the publisher's name.

When was the journal founded, and how often does it appear?

It was established in 2004 and publishes two issues a year, one mid-year and one at the end of the year. It was indexed in Scopus in 2009 and moved to the Digital Commons platform in 2025.

Does TJER charge authors?

No. The journal states it has never charged publication fees, and DOAJ confirms there are no article processing charges. It is open access for readers and free for authors.

What is its acceptance rate and review model?

The journal publishes an acceptance rate of 6.8 percent, and it uses double-blind review; it adheres to the COPE principles and code of conduct and operates plagiarism screening.

What subjects does it cover?

General engineering, organised around energy and environmental, mechanical and thermal, civil and structural, electrical and electronic, and artificial intelligence and computational engineering, spanning architecture, chemical, industrial, materials and petroleum engineering as well.

What are its citation metrics?

OpenAlex recorded 573 works, 2,422 citations and an h-index of 20 for this ISSN pair at checking time, with the caveat that its coverage window reaches back before 2004. Scopus-based secondary summaries have placed the journal in Q4 in Engineering (miscellaneous). Quote metrics with source and date, and beware figures belonging to its Kuwaiti and Egyptian namesakes.