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

Rubin, M. A., 2002, Tech.Sight. Understanding disease cell by cell, Science, 296, no. 5571, 1329–1330.

A journal article with 2 authors

Siliciano, J. D., and R. F. Siliciano, 2014, AIDS/HIV. Rekindled HIV infection, Science, 345, no. 6200, 1005–1006.

A journal article with 3 authors

Hinrichs, K.-U., L. R. Hmelo, and S. P. Sylva, 2003, Molecular fossil record of elevated methane levels in late Pleistocene coastal waters, Science, 299, no. 5610, 1214–1217.

A journal article with 11 or more authors

Lu, H., C.-A. Wang, Y. Huang, and H. Xie, 2014, Multi-enhanced-phonon scattering modes in Ln-Me-A sites co-substituted LnMeA11O19 ceramics, Sci. Rep., 4, 6823.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Wilson, G. P., 2011, Managing to the New Regulatory Reality, John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, NJ.

An edited book

Kollias, S. D., A. Stafylopatis, W. Duch, and E. Oja (eds.), 2006, Artificial Neural Networks – ICANN 2006: 16th International Conference, Athens, Greece, September 10-14, 2006. Proceedings, Part I, Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg, Lecture Notes in Computer Science.

A chapter in an edited book

Manias, E., and L. A. Utracki, 2014, Thermodynamics of Polymer Blends, in Polymer Blends Handbook L. A. Utracki, and C. A. Wilkie (Editors), Springer Netherlands, Dordrecht, 171–289.

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

O`Callaghan, J., 2017, Remnants Of An Ancient Mini-Planet Might Be In Orbit Near Mars, IFLScience: <https://www.iflscience.com/space/remnants-of-an-ancient-miniplanet-might-be-in-orbit-near-mars/> (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, 2002, Research and Development: Lessons Learned from Previous Research Could Benefit FreedomCAR Initiative, GAO-02-810T, 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

Beeler, M. C., 2010, Disordered Ultracold Two-Dimensional Bose Gases, Doctoral dissertation, University of Maryland, College Park, College Park, MD.

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

Hubbard, B., and E. Schmitt, 2017, Saudi Official Who Fell From View Is Promoted, A6.

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Rubin, 2002).
This sentence cites two references (Rubin, 2002; Siliciano and Siliciano, 2014).

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

Two authors: (Siliciano and Siliciano, 2014)
Three or more authors: (Lu et al., 2014)

About the journal

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

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