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 32,000 references from nearly 500 titles. Table 2 lists the first twenty journals containing the largest number of articles included in the ISC Event Bibliography.

Last updated: 2024-07-18.

AuthorN(papers)
Kanamori,H.
339
Li,Y.
217
Xu,C.
208
Zhang,Y.
203
Lay,T.
194
Liu,J.
193
Satake,K.
178
Li,Z.
177
Wang,Y.
166
Wang,X.
141
Bürgmann,R.
139
Okal,E.A.
137
Wang,W.
134
Liu,Y.
130
Zhang,X.
127
Xu,X.
126
Zhang,J.
123
Li,J.
121
Chen,X.
120
Wang,J.
119
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.
2987
J. geophys. Res.
2011
Geophys. Res. Lett.
1694
Geophys. J. Int.
1253
Seismol. Res. Lett.
1167
Tectonophysics
975
J. Phys. Earth/Earth Planets Space
925
Pure appl. Geophys.
860
Chinese J. Geophys.
598
Earthq. Spectra
589
Acta seism. sin.
545
Bull. Earthq. Res. Inst. Tokyo Univ.
451
Natural Hazards
434
Zisin
402
Nature
365
Earth planet. Sci. Lett.
359
Annls Geophys.
344
Phys. Earth planet. Interiors
341
J. Seismol.
333
Bull. Earthquake Eng.
301
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.