Supplemental Material Guidelines

Authors may include Supplemental Material with submissions to the Bulletin of the Seismological Society of America (BSSA) and Seismological Research Letters (SRL). The Seismic Record (TSR) may consider Supplemental Material at the Editor-in-Chief’s discretion. All Supplemental Material is subject to peer review.

By definition, Supplemental Material enhances understanding of a submission but isn’t integral to that understanding. In other words, a submission must stand on its own without the Supplemental Material. If content submitted as Supplemental Material is essential to understand the submission, the Editors may request that it be moved to the submission. Supplemental Material should not be specifically cited in your manuscript but may be referred to generally. Please include a short description of the Supplemental Material in the Data and Resources section of your manuscript.

Supplemental Material is published with articles on the journal websites. Supplemental Material is not edited or typeset. It is published as submitted by the authors, in the native file formats submitted by the authors. If the file is in an unsupported format, the fill will be zipped and posted online.  When published, Supplemental Material is governed by SSA’s Copyright Transfer Policy.

Supplemental figures, tables, text and video should be labeled and referred to with a capital letter “S’ (i.e., Figure S1, Figure S2, Table S1, Text S1, Video S1, etc.).

Authors may create an optional Cover Page for Supplemental Material. This optional Cover Page also publishes online in the file format (Word or PDF) submitted by the author. We suggest organizing the Cover Page as follows:

  • Article title
  • Author names (do not include affiliations, superscripts or notes)
  • Description of the Supplemental Material
  • Supplemental Text
  • List of Supplemental Table Captions
  • List of Supplemental Figure Captions
  • List of Other Supplemental Files such as videos, with a description of each
  • Data and Resources and References that are specific to the Supplemental Material

Authors may choose to submit the Cover Page information and all Supplemental Text, Tables and Figures within one document; or submit the Supplemental Tables and Figures as separate files. All files must be submitted individually.  Supported file formats include: db, doc, docx, fla, flv, htm, html, m4a, pdf, png, ppt, pptx, sgm, sgml, swf, txt, wma, xls, xlsx, xml and zip.

Authors are encouraged to include “supplement” in their file names.  

Upload Supplemental Material files smaller than 15mb to Editorial Manager under the “Supplemental Material” category. Upload CSV, Excel, Video and Other files under the “Supplemental Material-Other” category; these files will not build into the PDF file used by editors and reviewers, but the file links will be included in the PDF file. For zip files or files larger than 15 mb, please contact the BSSA Editorial Office, SRL Editorial Office or TSR Editorial Office for instructions about uploading Supplemental Material files to a secure FTP site.

If you are submitting individual files instead of one document, place the Supplemental Material files in the following order: optional Cover Page, tables in sequential order, figures in sequential order (if not included in the Cover Page document), Other files in sequential order.

SSA strongly encourages authors to submit Supplemental Material in common, non-proprietary formats that download efficiently.  Please use one of the above named formats for each file submitted.  We recommend using jpeg, png, or PDF for separate figure files and Excel, Word or PDF for separate tables. Please consider your reader when deciding on length, format, file types and file sizes for Supplemental Material.

A $120 processing fee will be added to the publication charges for any article with Supplemental Material.

If you have any questions regarding the preparation of your electronic supplement, please contact:

BSSA Editorial Office

SRL Editorial Office

TSR Editorial Office