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This paper presents a new and relatively simple engineering method forcalculating the stress intensity factors for small-to-medium cracks emanating from a notchunder arbitrary loading. The formulation can be used in calculating the fatigue life of notchedcomponents as well as in the shape optimisation problems with durability constraints. Severalexamples are considered to demonstrate the advantages of the present method in comparisonwith both existing approximate approaches and finite element techniques.