Two of his early contributions are the concept of the J-integral in fracture mechanics and an explanation of how plastic deformations localize in a narrow band.
By the time he started to publish his first major, high-cited, publications in 1967–68, he was assistant professor of engineering at Brown University.
[4] A seminal contribution was the below-listed paper in Philosophical Magazine with Robb Thomson of the National Bureau of Standards (now NIST) on the critical conditions for the emission of dislocations from crack tips, and thus the criterion for blunting versus propagation of a brittle crack.
In 1994, he received the Timoshenko Medal "for seminal contributions to the understanding of plasticity and fracture of engineering materials and applications in the development in the computational and experimental methods of broad significance in mechanical engineering practice".
[7] Rice was elected a member of the National Academy of Engineering in 1980 for providing a sound and practical basis for the needed rapid development of inelastic fracture mechanics.