SRL: Electronic Supplement Guidelines

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). 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. Supplemental materials will be published online alongside the electronic version of your article.

Please note that the material must be supplemental; that is, papers published in BSSA or in SRL must be complete without the electronic supplement.

Also please note that authors of articles with electronic supplements in BSSA and SRL will be charged a $120 processing fee.

BSSA and SRL Esupp Guidelines

Submit your electronic supplement files in Editorial Manager under the “Supplemental Material” category.  The main page should be submitted in Word.  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 supplement should contain the title of the paper, the list of authors, and a brief introductory paragraph or two describing the supplemental material. Supplemental figures and tables must be labeled with a capital letter “S” (i.e. Figure S1, Figure S2, Table S1, etc.)  In order to facilitate the handling of electronic supplements, you should create files in widely accepted formats.

  • Create a main page in Word and upload it under the “Supplemental Material” category in Editorial Manager.
  • Upload each table as a separate file (either in Word or CSV format).  If the table is in Word format, include the caption above each table, as well as on the main page of the supplement.  Label each table “Table S1, Table S2, etc.”  If the table is in CSV format, the table caption should only appear on the main page.
  • Upload each figure as a separate file (GIF, JPEG, and PNG only -color JPEG and PNG files must be in RGB mode, not CMYK) under the “Supplemental Material” category in Editorial Manager.  Please do NOT submit images as PDFs.  Do not include the figure caption or figure number on the figure.  The figure caption should be placed on the main page.  Figures should be labeled “Figure S1, Figure S2, etc.”
  • Animations should be supplied as MPEG files compressed with freely-available (that is, non-proprietary) codecs or as h.264-encoded MP4 files. Please do NOT submit animations (or other videos) as .AVI, .WMV, .MOV or .MKV files.
  • In the “Manuscript” file, include “available in the electronic supplement to this article” after every reference to the electronic supplement (i.e. “see Table S1, available in the electronic supplement to this article”).
  • All archive files included in Electronic Supplements should be compressed using standard Zip format except for software and/or source code intended for use on Unix, Linux or similar systems which may be archived in tar or tar gzip format. Please do not use Rar, 7Zip, Stuffit or other proprietary and/or non-standard archive formats.

If your supplement contains citations, it must also contain a complete reference list that follows BSSA style for references (see https://www.seismosoc.org/publications/bssa/authors/policies.php).

Please look at the following examples of some of the types of material that take advantage of the capabilities of the Web and are therefore suitable for electronic supplements, and how to format your supplement:

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 that revisions are necessary.  You can elect to have SSA make the changes, but there is a charge for this service.

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

BSSA Editorial Office

SRL Editorial Office