Motivation for the ISC Event Bibliography


Seismologists often need to identify and review scientific articles related to specific earthquakes or other seismic events that occurred at particular times or in specific regions. Most advanced bibliographical searches such as Google Scholar would require them to type a text string containing a commonly used name for the earthquake or the region and date it occurred. The search may need to be repeated several times to account for all possible transliterations of a place name in English, several different ways of specifying a date and a variety of names of the area where the earthquake has occurred. The results then have to be merged and the unavoidable duplicates removed. The procedure is daunting and often leads to unstable results.

The ISC Event Bibliography allows users to search for references to scientific publications linked to both natural and anthropogenic events that have occurred in the geographical region of their interest by performing an interactive search based on earthquake (location, time) and/or publication parameters (author name, journal, year of publication, etc.).

The output is presented in a format accepted by major scientific journals. For most recent publications the results would include the DOI, allowing users a direct access to scientific articles from corresponding journal websites.

The ISC Event Bibliography is intended to include those publications that are dedicated to specific seismic events. Publications describing global earthquake catalogues, such as the GCMT, ISC-EHB or ISC-GEM are not linked to the Event Bibliography, nor are the publications that deal with seismicity of specific regions or include large regional earthquake catalogues.

With rare exceptions, we included only those publications that contained English titles and abstracts. We make no judgement of quality of scientific articles.

This is the first release of the Event Bibliography, which is not yet comprehensive to include all relevant articles. We continue to include further entries and inviting our users to help us with necessary updates.

References to publications are not limited to Seismology. They cover a broad range of disciplines including, but not limited to earthquake engineering, tectonics, structural geology, geodesy, remote sensing, nuclear test monitoring, tsunami, landslides, environmental studies, coastal science, natural disasters, hydrology, geochemistry, atmospheric sciences and geomagnetism. This feature makes the Event Bibliography an attractive tool for multidisciplinary studies and useful for researchers and students from different fields.

We expect that this ISC product will also be helpful in facilitating the work of authors, reviewers and journal editors during the entire process of scientific article publication.