SAN FRANCISCO (3 December 2018) – The Seismological Society of America (SSA) announced today the appointment of Allison Bent, a research seismologist with Natural Resources Canada, as editor-in-chief of Seismological Research Letters (SRL).
Accessible by all SSA members and available in more than 1,300 academic, government and corporate 
institutions worldwide, SRL publishes six issues per year and includes peer-reviewed papers, columns and various categories of news about in the field of seismology. With an impact factor of 3.275, SRL is the highest ranking journal with a sole focus on seismology.
“SRL is quite possibly the only high quality journal that truly has something for everyone,” said Bent. “In addition to the traditional scholarly articles covering the complete breadth of seismology, the columns and news items provide the seismological community with a wealth of information that might not be easily accessed otherwise.”
Bent is a past member of the SSA Board of Directors and has served as an Associate Editor of the Bulletin of the Seismological Society of America (BSSA) since 2014. Her primary research interests are earthquake sources with particular emphasis on historical, instrumentally recorded earthquakes and earthquakes in stable continental environments, crustal structure and tackling issues related to improving seismic hazard estimates, such as magnitude conversion relations and ground motions. [Bent discussed her research on earthquake magnitude in the May 2018 issue of SSA At Work.] Bent has worked at Natural Resources Canada since receiving her Ph.D. from California Institute of Technology in 1990.
Bent will succeed Zhigang Peng, a professor of geophysics at Georgia Institute of Technology, who has held SRL’s top editor post for the past five years. Under Peng’s leadership, the journal introduced several new community features, including the Data Mine and Communicating Science columns, and expanded its focus sections. Known for its speed to publication, SRL’s average time for first decision is less than 30 days and the submission to publication process is typically less than five months.
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The Seismological Society of America (SSA) was born in the aftershocks of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, as engineers, mathematicians and geologists united to learn more about the devastating event. From these earliest days, SSA has been committed to the science of seismology and sharing research with the public to help build an earthquake-aware world. While the home base for our nonprofit organization remains in California, more than 40 percent of our 2,800 members live and work outside the U.S. The Society’s journals, the Bulletin of the Seismological Society of America (BSSA) and Seismological Research Letters (SRL), are the leading source of peer-reviewed research in seismology and related disciplines.
For more information, please contact Becky Ham in the SSA Press Office at press@seismosoc.org.