Overview of the ISC Event Bibliography


As of , the ISC Event Bibliography includes scientific articles that were published since the beginning of last century and related to seismic events that occurred since 1904 (Fig. 1).

We are working on extending the completeness of the Event Bibliography as far as the past and recent instrumentally recorded events are concerned. We are also updating the Event Bibliography on a monthly basis as soon as the new publications become available.

Figure 1. Annual number of publications (top) linked to seismic events, annual number of events (middle) and the distribution of the number of papers related to each seismic event (bottom); there is an on-going effort to fill the gap in the late 1960s and early 1970s as well as in the first part of the 20th century.

The majority of seismic events are described in just one or two scientific publications, yet a few events have attracted a large number of articles. A good recent example is the Tohoku earthquake of March 11, 2011 that is described in over 2000 articles.

Table 1 shows the first twenty authors with the largest number of event-oriented articles included in the ISC Event Bibliography. Please note that this number does not include all articles written by each author and by no means is intended to be viewed as an author ranking.

Authors are encouraged to check for missing publications or associations to other events and report such instances using Submit Your Article or Contact Us.

As of , the Event Bibliography database contains over 31,000 references from nearly 500 titles. Table 2 lists the first twenty journals containing the largest number of articles included in the ISC Event Bibliography.

AuthorN(papers)
Kanamori,H.
339
Li,Y.
188
Lay,T.
186
Xu,C.
186
Zhang,Y.
169
Satake,K.
168
Liu,J.
165
Li,Z.
148
Wang,Y.
141
Bürgmann,R.
136
Okal,E.A.
135
Xu,X.
117
Wang,W.
112
Liu,Y.
112
Singh,S.K.
111
Hayakawa,M.
110
Zhang,J.
110
Chen,X.
109
Wang,X.
107
Li,J.
102
Table 1. List of the first twenty authors with the largest number of event-oriented articles included in the ISC Event Bibliography. This number does not include all articles written by each author and by no means is intended to be viewed as an author ranking.
JournalN(papers)
Bull. seism. Soc. Am.
2932
J. geophys. Res.
1920
Geophys. Res. Lett.
1601
Geophys. J. Int.
1195
Seismol. Res. Lett.
1083
Tectonophysics
933
J. Phys. Earth/Earth Planets Space
899
Pure appl. Geophys.
826
Earthq. Spectra
569
Acta seism. sin.
530
Chinese J. Geophys.
504
Bull. Earthq. Res. Inst. Tokyo Univ.
451
Natural Hazards
407
Zisin
400
Nature
350
Earth planet. Sci. Lett.
345
Annls Geophys.
342
Phys. Earth planet. Interiors
326
J. Seismol.
312
Bull. Earthquake Eng.
291
Table 2. List of the first twenty journals with more articles in the ISC Event Bibliography.

Figure 2 shows the spatial distribution of seismic events in the ISC Event Bibliography and the list of the top 50 events by number of associated publications. Unsurprisingly, most of these events occurred in Japan, California, Europe and Central America. For ease of use, we have adopted event codes selected to resemble the event names most commonly used in the literature.

Figure 2. The map of the ISC seismic events color-coded by the number of associated scientific publications (top) and list of the top 50 earthquakes with the largest number of associated publications.