Data and Resources Section Guidelines

BSSA

Data and Resources Section Guidelines

The Society requires that authors identify the sources of data used during research and give information about whether those sources are available to readers. A Data and Resources section must precede the Acknowledgements section. This section should be used to identify all data sources that are not taken from published works referenced in the References. An example of data from a published work would be an earthquake catalog listed in a table or electronic supplement of a published paper. If an online database is used, then it should be included here. If there is a published work describing the database, then that work can be included in the References. However, online databases should not be included in the References.

When a data source is mentioned in the body of the paper it should be followed by a pointer to the Data and Resources section; e.g., “earthquake mechanisms were obtained from the Global Centroid Moment Tensor Project (see Data and Resources Section).” The corresponding entry in the Data and Resources section would be, “The Global Centroid Moment Tensor Project database was searched using www.globalcmt.org/CMTsearch.html (last accessed on August 5, 2007).”

This section may also be used to identify other resources such as computer codes including the Generic Mapping Tools (GMT). Such resources do not need to be mentioned in previous sections of the paper.

Some examples:

  • Seismograms used in this study were collected as part of the Central Kansas Lithospheric Experiment using PASSCAL instruments. Data can be obtained from the IRIS Data Management Center at www.iris.edu (last accessed August 2003).
  • Well logs were provided by Central Oil Company and are proprietary. They cannot be released to the public.
  • Seismograms used in this study were collected using a classified network of the U.S. Government and cannot be released to the public.
  • No data were used in this paper. Some plots were made using the Generic Mapping Tools version 4.2.1 (www.soest.hawaii.edu/gmt; Wessel and Smith, 1998).
  • All data used in this paper came from published sources listed in the references.