How to format your references using the Bulletin of the Seismological Society of America citation style

This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for Bulletin of the Seismological Society of America (BSSA). For a complete guide how to prepare your manuscript refer to the journal's instructions to authors.

Using reference management software

Typically you don't format your citations and bibliography by hand. The easiest way is to use a reference manager:

Paperpile	The citation style is built in and you can choose it in Settings > Citation Style or Paperpile > Citation Style in Google Docs.
EndNote	Download the output style file
Mendeley, Zotero, Papers, and others	The style is either built in or you can download a CSL file that is supported by most references management programs.
BibTeX	BibTeX syles are usually part of a LaTeX template. Check the instructions to authors if the publisher offers a LaTeX template for this journal.

Journal articles

Those examples are references to articles in scholarly journals and how they are supposed to appear in your bibliography.

Not all journals organize their published articles in volumes and issues, so these fields are optional. Some electronic journals do not provide a page range, but instead list an article identifier. In a case like this it's safe to use the article identifier instead of the page range.

A journal article with 1 author

Haag, A., 2007, Alternatives in Colorado, Nature, 446, no. 7135, 578–579.

A journal article with 2 authors

Kelley, K. A., and E. Cottrell, 2009, Water and the oxidation state of subduction zone magmas, Science, 325, no. 5940, 605–607.

A journal article with 3 authors

Sekiguchi, Y., K. Arai, and S. Kohshima, 2006, Sleep behaviour: sleep in continuously active dolphins, Nature, 441, no. 7096, E9-10; discussion E11.

A journal article with 11 or more authors

Engler, A. J., P. O. Humbert, B. Wehrle-Haller, and V. M. Weaver, 2009, Multiscale modeling of form and function, Science, 324, no. 5924, 208–212.

Books and book chapters

Here are examples of references for authored and edited books as well as book chapters.

An authored book

Wasson, C. S., 2005, System Analysis, Design, and Development, John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, NJ.

An edited book

Rosa, M., 2016, Current and Future Perspectives of Ethnomathematics as a Program, Springer International Publishing, Cham, ICME-13 Topical Surveys.

A chapter in an edited book

Mesbah, M., B. Boashash, M. Balakrishnan, and P. B. Coldiz, 2009, Heart Rate Variability Time-Frequency Analysis for Newborn Seizure Detection, in Advanced Biosignal Processing A. Naït-Ali (Editor), Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg, 95–121.

Web sites

Sometimes references to web sites should appear directly in the text rather than in the bibliography. Refer to the Instructions to authors for Bulletin of the Seismological Society of America.

Blog post

Fang, J., 2014, New Drug Boosts Nerve Regrowth in Rats With Spinal Cord Injuries, IFLScience: <https://www.iflscience.com/brain/new-drug-boosts-nerve-regrowth-rats-spinal-cord-injuries/> (accessed October 30, 2018).

Reports

This example shows the general structure used for government reports, technical reports, and scientific reports. If you can't locate the report number then it might be better to cite the report as a book. For reports it is usually not individual people that are credited as authors, but a governmental department or agency like "U. S. Food and Drug Administration" or "National Cancer Institute".

Government report

Government Accountability Office, 1977, Examination of the Circumstances Surrounding a Grant Awarded by the U.S. Energy Research and Development Administration, EMD-78-13, U.S. Government Printing Office, Washington, DC.

Theses and dissertations

Theses including Ph.D. dissertations, Master's theses or Bachelor theses follow the basic format outlined below.

Doctoral dissertation

Weber, C., 2013, Exercise for older adults with dementia, Doctoral dissertation, California State University, Long Beach, Long Beach, CA.

News paper articles

Unlike scholarly journals, news papers do not usually have a volume and issue number. Instead, the full date and page number is required for a correct reference.

New York Times article

Wagner, J., 2017, Wheeler and Gsellman Join the Mets’ Rotation, B11.

In-text citations

References should be cited in the text by name and year in parentheses:

This sentence cites one reference (Haag, 2007).
This sentence cites two references (Haag, 2007; Kelley and Cottrell, 2009).

Here are examples of in-text citations with multiple authors:

Two authors: (Kelley and Cottrell, 2009)
Three or more authors: (Engler et al., 2009)

About the journal

Full journal title	Bulletin of the Seismological Society of America
ISSN (print)	0037-1106
ISSN (online)	1943-3573
Scope