Proper pretest planning is a vital component of any successful vibration test on engineering structures. The most important issue in dynamic testing of many engineering structures is arriving at the number and optimal placement of sensors. The sensors must be placed on the structure in such a way that all the important dynamic behaviour of a structural system is captured during the course of the test with sufficient accuracy so that the information can be effectively utilised for structural parameter identification or health monitoring. Several optimal sensor placement (OSP) techniques are proposed in the literature and each of these methods have been evaluated with respect to a specific problem encountered in various engineering disciplines like aerospace, civil, mechanical engineering, etc. In the present work, we propose to perform a detailed characteristic evaluation of some selective popular OSP techniques with respect to their application to practical civil engineering problems. Numerical experiments carried out in the paper on various practical civil engineering structures indicate that effective independence (EFI) method is more consistent when compared to all other sensor placement techniques.