How Much Knowledge Has Been Obtained from an Earthquake?A Survey of Seismological Publications

We analyzed the International Seismoogical Center(ISC)catalogue of seismologil publicationsfrom 1980 to 1995 to investigate how much infonformation provided by an earithquake hes beenutilized to obtain a better undertanding of earthauakes and selsmic disaster.We sekect the ISCbulletin which has a wider coverage of seismological journals and languages than the ScientificCitation Index(SCI),so that there is less regional or language bias in the analysis.The earth-quakes in the catalogue span the period from 1975 to 1990.Papers which have direct relationwith an earthquake as defined by the ISC catalogue range from 1 to 10~2 in order of magni-tudes.The logarithm of the maximum number of papers on an earthquake is shown to be prop-ortional to the magnitude of the earthquake,which provides a possibility to define a“normali-zed impact strength”of an earthquake,so that earthquakes with different magnitudes can becompared with each other.Magnitude span of the earthquakes with a certain“impact strengthlevel”an