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Earthquake time history records are required to perform dynamic nonlinear analyses. In order to provide a suitable set of such records, they are scaled to match a target spectrum as introduced in the well-known design codes. Corresponding scaling factors are taken similar in practice however, optimizing them reduces extra-ordinary economic charge for the seismic design. In the present work a new hybrid meta-heuristic is developed combining key features from genotypic search and particle swarm optimization. The method is applied to an illustrative example via a parametric study to evaluate its effectiveness and less probability of premature convergence compared with the standard particle swarm optimization.