Recently, Georisk: Assessment and Management of Risk for Engineered Systems and Geohazards, an international authoritative journal in the field of reliability and risk of geotechnical engineering, announced that the 2021 Most Cited Paper Award went to Professor Zhang Wengang from the School of Civil Engineering, Chongqing University.

The research paper "Assessment of pile vulnerability using random forest regression and multivariate adaptive regression splines" composed by Zhang Wengang and other coauthors systematically expounds the research on performance of random forest regression and multivariate adaptive regression (MARS) models based on cross validation and Lasso regularization in predicting the maximum compressive stress caused by piling and the drivability of pile per foot in geotechnical engineering. Since its publication, this paper has been continuously evaluated and cited by scholars at home and abroad and has been referred to 95 times in WOS at present.

Georisk, published by Taylor & Francis, an internationally renowned press, is the first international academic professional journal in the field of reliability and risk of geotechnical engineering. Four issues are published every year. Academic researches published by Georisk cover many fields, such as geological disasters, geotechnical engineering safety and reliability, environmental risks, seismic risks, reliability design and specification calibration, geographic information systems, engineering data analysis and machine learning, etc. The research focuses on the geotechnical properties and the quantification of the uncertainty of analysis models as well as the propagation process in geotechnical engineering reliability and risk assessment and aims to provide a platform for interdisciplinary academic exchange in related fields of geotechnical engineering risks, leading the academic frontier in geotechnical engineering risk field, and promoting the application of quantitative analysis and control theory of geotechnical engineering risk in practice. Georisk was included in SCIE in 2020, with an impact factor of 3.890, located in Q2.

According to citations in Scopus for five consecutive years, it selected the annual "Georisk Most Cited Paper Award" combined with judgment of the executive editor to commend the contributions of authors whose papers are highly cited. Although published for one year, this paper has been cited the most among the papers published by Georisk from 2018 to 2022, which reflects readers' high concern for data-driven methods and objectively embodies the profound impact of this paper on the risk assessment and management of engineering systems and geological disasters.