Seismica Style Guide

Updated 19 June 2022

This page provides a few basic style guidelines for things like date/time formats and units. Authors should try to follow these guidelines to the best of their ability. The Standards and Copy-Editing team will attempt to standardize articles post-acceptance, but the Seismica’s volunteer copy-editors would greatly appreciate authors’ help in preparing their articles according to this style guide.

General rules

Title of the Article Written in Title Case: Capitalize words other than prepositions (in, on, of, for, etc.), conjunctions (and, or), and articles (the, a, an) in the title of your article.

Define Your Acronyms (DYA): The first use of all acronyms and initializations must be defined within text, with the abbreviation in parentheses. Any further use may simply use the acronym. Authors may elect to spell out acronyms an additional time at the first use in each section for longer papers.

Semi vs bi: Use semiannual, semimonthly, semiweekly to describe events occurring twice per year, month, week. Use biannual, bimonthly, biweekly to describe events occurring once every two years, months, weeks.

Numbers and statistics

Earthquake magnitudes: Write magnitudes as M<5, M≥7. Do not use spaces. In LaTeX, write $M{<}5$ or $M{\geq}7$ to suppress extra spaces in math mode.

Statistical tests: For terms like p-value or t-test, italicize p, t. Hyphenate the term, and do not capitalize.

Dates and times

Long form dates: Write long form dates as dd M yyyy: for example, 25 January 2022

Short form dates: Write short form dates as dd/mm/yyyy: for example, 25/01/2022

Times: Use 24-hour time. UTC is the default time zone unless otherwise specified. If you are using a different time zone, be sure to clarify, and do not assume the reader will know. Example times: 14:35, 14:35:22, 14:35:22.187, 07:35:22 PDT

Standard abbreviations

Items on this list do not need to be defined. This is not exclusive and all standard SI unit abbreviations are acceptable. LaTeX users may choose to use the siunitx package to typeset units, but this is not required.

km	kilometer
m	meter
sec (or s)	seconds
Hz	Hertz
° , deg	degrees (temperature or arc)
Pa	Pascals
kPa	kiloPascals
bar	bar
psi	pounds per square inch
Nm	Newton-meter
dyn-cm	dyne-centimeter
azm	azimuth
baz	backazimuth
ft	feet
mi	miles
nm	nanometer, nautical miles (context)