The Seismological Society of America’s newest peer-reviewed journal, The Seismic Record (TSR), has earned its first official Clarivate Impact Factor of 5.3, ranking 6th out of 103 journals in the geochemistry and geophysics category. The Impact Factor measures how frequently a journal’s articles are cited by other researchers, serving as a comparable gauge of a publication’s scientific influence within its field. A score of 5.3 is exceptionally high for a first-time ranking, demonstrating a high level of trust and adoption by the global scientific community.
Since its 2021 launch, TSR, a gold open-access journal, has expanded its international audience and is now fully indexed in Scopus, the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) and the Web of Science. By maintaining a swift 30-day average time to first decision and averaging more than 1,000 downloads per article, the journal has solidified its status with many authors as a trusted, high-speed venue for time-sensitive findings.
Jesse Kearse, a research fellow in geophysics at Victoria University of Wellington/Te Herenga Waka, and colleague Yoshihiro Kaneko chose TSR for their study, “ Curved Fault Slip Captured by CCTV Video During the 2025 Mw 7.7 Myanmar Earthquake ,” which has already been downloaded more than 4,400 times since its publication last July.
“This study was conceived, carried out, written and ready for submission within four weeks, so we were looking for a venue that could provide rapid peer review and publication,” Kearse said of the paper, now the most downloaded in TSR’s history. He added, “TSR lived up to its reputation.”
The journal’s global reach impressed University of Iceland researcher Angel Ruiz-Angulo after his team published “ SWOT Satellite Altimetry Observations and Source Model for the Tsunami from the 2025 M 8.8 Kamchatka Earthquake .” “Colleagues from all over the world mentioned it to me,” he said, noting “the scale of the response was remarkable.”
Led by Interim Editor-in-Chief Vera Schulte-Pelkum (University of Colorado, Boulder), TSR’s editorial board draws its expertise from across the globe and includes many well-known seismologists, as does the network of more than 1,000 volunteer reviewers who uphold the scientific integrity of Society publications.
In addition to TSR’s good news in the 2026 Journal Citation Reports, the journal demonstrated strong performance in the 2025 CiteScores, which use a traditional four-year citation window to measure average citations per article. TSR increased its score to 7.8, up from 6.7 the previous year.
To date, TSR articles have been downloaded more than 485,000 times. To learn more about TSR, visit seismosoc.org/publications/the-seismic-record .
TSR is published by the Seismological Society of America (SSA), a nonprofit scientific society devoted to the advancement of earthquake science. Founded in 1906 in San Francisco, the Society now has members throughout the world representing a variety of technical interests: seismologists and other geophysicists, geologists, engineers, insurers and policymakers in preparedness and safety. The Society publishes the other two leading journals of seismology: Bulletin of the Seismological Society of America and Seismological Research Letters . To learn more, visit SSA online.