Electronic Supplement Guidelines
Authors are encouraged to devise and to submit supplemental digital material that will accompany papers prepared for the Bulletin of the Seismological Society of America (BSSA) and for Seismological Research Letters (SRL). Electronic components of articles will be disseminated by being placed on the SSA Web site (http://www.seismosoc.org).
The editors especially encourage the submission of high-resolution graphical information, animations of time-sequenced observations or simulations, and three-dimensional data models. Other forms of digital material may also be proposed for editorial consideration.
We have examples of some of the types of material that take advantage of the capabilities of the Web and are therefore suitable for electronic supplements.
Preparation, Submission, and Review of Electronic Supplements
Please make your electronic supplement (e-supp) available at a URL accessible from the public Internet. All Web pages submitted as part of your electronic supplement must be written in valid HTML. Many Web page editing/creation programs (e.g., Dreamweaver, Homesite, GoLive, BBEdit) include an HTML syntax-checking function that will help you validate your HTML, or you can use the World Wide Web Consortium's free HTML validation service at http://validator.w3.org/. Unfortunately, HTML produced by Microsoft® Word's "Save as HTML ..." function is not acceptable.
Naming the E-supp
The name of the main e-supp Web page should begin with the manuscript number if it is known. Please use the following convention: manuscript#-esupp.html (e.g., "BSSA-D-08-00100-esupp.html"). If the e-supp is submitted with an original manuscript, the manuscript number will not be known, and the name of the main e-supp Web page should therefore begin with the first author's last name (for example, smith-esupp.html). If you are submitting more than one manuscript with an e-supp, append a number after the name (for example, smith1-esupp.html.)
Formatting the E-supp
The supplement should be formatted in a style consistent with that of other electronic supplements on the SSA Web site. The main page of the e-supp should contain title of paper, list of authors, and a brief introductory paragraph or two describing the supplemental material. The main page can contain the supplemental material, or it can contain links to the supplemental material. Graphic and tabular material should be referred to in the text of the supplement in a fashion consistent with SSA's editorial style (for example, "Figure 2" or "Table 3"). Supplemental figures that are color versions of figures appearing in the main article should have the same number as the figures in the paper.
Please look at the following existing e-supps as examples of how to format your Web pages:
- E-Supp to "Fault Parameter Constraints Using Relocated Earthquakes: A Validation of First Motion Focal Mechanism Data" from BSSA 96:3 -
3D visualization of relocated earthquakes and accuracy of focal mechanisms - E-Supp to "The 14 November 2001 Kokoxili (Kunlunshan), Tibet, Earthquake: Rupture Transfer through a Large Extensional Step-Over" from BSSA 94:4 -
Waveform fits to teleseismic body waves - E-Supp to
"Geologic Setting of the 1884 Bear Lake, Idaho, Earthquake: Rupture in the Hanging Wall of a Basin and Range Normal Fault Revealed by Historical and Geological Analyses" from BSSA 93:4 -
Felt Reports and Individual Town Summaries - E-Supp to
"Visualization of 3-D Wave Propagation from the 2000 Tottori-ken Seibu, Japan earthquake: Observation and Numerical Simulation" from BSSA 93:2 -
MPEG movies of observed and simulated wave fields - E-Supp to
"Ground Motions at Memphis and St. Louis from M 7.5-8.0 Earthquakes in the New Madrid Seismic Zone" from BSSA 93:2 -
Time histories and spectra for modeled scenarios
File Types
In order to facilitate the handling of electronic supplements, you should create files in widely accepted formats. Acceptable formats for images are GIF, JPEG, and PNG. Animations should be supplied as MPEG files compressed with freely-available (that is, non-proprietary) codecs. Tabular data should be tab-delimited or comma-delimited ASCII files or HTML tables, and should be accompanied by descriptive text explaining the contents of the fields in the table.
Comprehensive Guidelines and Template
If you are not familiar with creating web pages, please consider using these directions and template. (Both of these files can be downloaded as a single zip archive: SSA-esupp-template.zip.)
Submission
When the e-supp has been completed, put all of the files in a directory on a Web server or FTP site and then validate the HTML with the service at http://validator.w3.org/. Send the address to Carol Mark at bssa [at] seismosoc.org or enter it into the submission-questions text box when you upload your manuscript to the online submission site.
Review and Revision
All electronic supplements must be reviewed by the electronic-supplements editor and by SSA's Webmaster. If your supplement does not follow the guidelines, you will be notified by email that revisions are necessary. You can elect to have SSA make the changes, but there is a charge for this service.
Upload of Accepted Supplement
After the supplement has been accepted, please keep it available online until after your paper has been published. That will allow the Webmaster the time necessary to upload the supplemental material. If that will present a problem, please contact the editorial office at bssa [at] seismosoc.org.
If you have any questions regarding the preparation of your electronic supplement, please email esupps [at] seismosoc.org or bssa [at] seismosoc.org.