VTechWorks
VTechWorks provides global access to Virginia Tech scholarship, including journal articles, books, theses, dissertations, conference papers, slide presentations, technical reports, working papers, administrative documents, videos, images, and more by faculty, students, and staff. Faculty can deposit items to VTechWorks from Elements, including journal articles covered by the University open access policy. Email vtechworks@vt.edu for help.
Open Access Policy
Virginia Tech's open access policy enables researchers to deposit the accepted version of scholarly articles with no embargo.
Theses and Dissertations
Virginia Tech was first in the world to require ETDs in 1997, and continues to add scans of older theses and dissertations.
Open Textbooks
More than 50 freely available and openly licensed textbooks are among our most downloaded items.
Communities in VTechWorks
Select a community to browse its collections.
Recent Submissions
The TECHtonic, Spring 2026
(Virginia Tech, 2026-03)
The Spring 2026 issue of TECHtonic, the magazine for the Department of Geosciences.
31st Annual Geosciences Student Research Symposium
GSRS Coordinating Committee (Virginia Tech. Department of Geosciences, 2026-03-19)
An abstract book for the 31st GSRS held Thursday, March 19 and Friday March 20, 2026 in Kelly Hall and Derring Hall.
Sense of belonging in a scientific discipline predicts persistence intentions
Thayer, Nathan; Dayer, Ashley A.; Covino, Kristen; O'Connell, Timothy; Smith, Jennifer; Shizuka, Diazaburo (Elsevier, 2026-04-01)
Understanding the drivers of attrition of scientists in STEM fields remains a key concern. Further, diversifying the sciences and retaining marginalized scientists remains a challenge across the sciences. Here, we investigate the associations between a sense of belonging and intentions to persist in ornithology, a field of study within the sciences. Drawing on survey data gathered from members of three ornithological societies, we demonstrate that a higher sense of belonging is directly associated with stronger intentions to remain in ornithology. Further, marginalized members report, overall, a weaker sense of belonging, and stronger intentions to leave their field. Drawing on these findings, ultimately we argue for professional societies, which are uniquely positioned in the sciences to carve out disciplinary spaces outside of institutional contexts, to take actions to foster belonging in their disciplines.
Structural change in the U.S. office market after 2019: Evidence from lease-level data
Peng, Liang; Xiao, Xue (2026-03-19)
This paper examines how the leasing activities, contract features, and pricing of the Class A office leasing market have evolved since 2019 across five major U.S. markets: Los Angeles, the Bay Area, Dallas, Washington, D.C., and New York City. Using a granular dataset of 73,508 office leases from 2010 to 2024, we find a broad-based contraction in leasing volume and meaningful adjustments in contract features, including increased reliance on free rent and shifts in tenant-improvement usage. More importantly, we document structural changes in the determination of net effective rents at the lease level. In several major markets, longer leases, which were previously associated with rent discounts, began to command premiums after 2019, indicating a revaluation of contractual duration. We also find intensified spatial polarization and substantial reordering of tenant industry rent premiums, suggesting increased segmentation across geography and industry.
A Graphical Approach to Identifying Structural Bias Using Directed Acyclic Graphs: Its Application to Two-Wave Nonequivalent Control Group Designs
Shin, Jaehyun (Virginia Tech, 2026-03-18)
It is well known that the analysis of covariance (ANCOVA) and the change-score analysis (CSA) can produce quite different treatment-effect estimates when applied to data from two-wave nonequivalent control-group designs, a phenomenon known as the Lord's paradox. Pearl's (2009) structural causal model (SCM) provides a useful and intuitively appealing tool to address the Lord's paradox. Using the SCM, Kim and Steiner (2021) combined the backdoor criterion with the path-tracing rules and showed that it identified the exact bias for the CSA. Though they implied that this graphical causal model approach could be applied to the ANCOVA case in a similar way, they did not explicitly show the details. Therefore, in the present study, to examine their implication, I applied the graphical approach to the ANCOVA and compared the results with the bias derived by the population ordinary least squares (OLS) method (Lüdtke and Robitzsch, 2025). The comparison exhibited a discrepancy, though the core part of the bias obtained by the graphical approach was correct. Specifically, the discrepancy occurred in the terms that were proportional to the core part of the bias implied by each backdoor path. This means that, though the detection of the sources of bias and the identification of the conditions to eliminate the bias could be completed by the graphical approach, the exact quantification of the bias was not possible. To resolve this shortcoming, I applied the so-called regression anatomy formula, also known as the Frisch–Waugh–Lovell (FWL) theorem in econometrics, and found that the proportional term could be expressed as the residualization-induced scaling factor. I then extended this graphical approach to different data-generating scenarios within two-wave nonequivalent control-group designs and confirmed that it worked well in all cases. The residualization procedure makes a graphical approach self-contained to identify the exact structural bias.