Help:Use of the SERIAL type

Current Practice
The ISFDB supports a SERIAL type. As indicated in Help:Screen:EditPub this is used "...for an entry that would otherwise be either SHORTFICTION or NOVEL, but which is being serialized." It is also used for a novel-length work when published in a magazine or periodical complete in a single issue.

When there are multiple installments, each is recorded separately as a separate entry of type SERIAL, and will have a separate title entry.

Reprints in anthologies, collections, or omnibuses, or under separate covers, are not recorded with the SERIAL type, but a reprint that is in fact serialized, or a reprint of a novel in a single issue of a periodical, would use the SERIAL type. There are instances of novels that have been serialized more than once, with different numbers of installments.

Serial title records should normally NOT be merged with NOVEL or SHORTFICTION title records. The ISFDB software will in most cases display the serial records along with the record for the unserialized work. If a work has been serialized more than once, those records should only be merged if we are sure that the installments contained the same text.

Note that if the combination of story title and author name that is used in the serial was never used on a published version of the story, you will need to create a variant title of this work to link it to the title used in the published version. Thus you could take "Story name (Part 1 of Y)" and make it a variant of a new title record named "Story name", then take each of the other parts and make them variants of that "Story name" title.

However, current discussion suggests that a webzine may not be treated as a periodical publication, and so may not get the SERIAL type and the "(Complete Novel)" title form.

Title
A parenthetical statement such as "(Part 1 of 3)", preceded by a space, is appended to the title. When a novel length work (generally over 40,000 words or so) is published in a single issue of a magazine or other periodical, the parenthetical statement "(Complete Novel)", preceded by a space, is appended to the title.

Date
Serial installments of a work are always given the date of the magazine in which they appear even if the work has been published previously (or subsequently) in book or serial form.

Other uses
There have been some experiments with the use of the SERIAL type to connect closely related stories (for which the series feature now serves), non-contiguously published sections of a "braided" story (such as the story "Fever Season" in the book ) or other related works. Such experiments have not generally found favor, and such cases are now usually handled in other ways.

"Complete Novel" rule
The original reason for the "(Complete Novel)" rule was twofold. The first reason is that there are often significant textual differences between the magazine and the book versions of a given novel. The second reason has to do with the way bibliographers and collectors traditionally record book publications vs. magazine publications. If you open one of Clute's Encyclopedias, (i.e. of Science Fiction or of Fantasy), you'll see that he gives two dates for each serialized novel, one for the original serialization and one for the first book appearance. It appears that this tradition first arose in the book collecting world, where magazine publications were not considered "true first editions" due to the ephemeral nature of many early magazines and cheap pamphlets. Our current display logic, which shows both the first book appearance as well as all serializations of each novel, does a pretty good job of explaining what's going on.

Note that although both reasons support this principle, both are not required. An editor recently wrote in discussing this subject that "Magazine appearances of novels are always entered as Serials, using either the "Part X of Y" format or the "(Complete Novel)" format (depending on the number of installments) even if the text has been verified as unchanged between magazine and book publications." (Ahasuerus 01:56, 10 June 2009 (UTC), writing in the "Against The Fall Of Night" thread referenced below.)

Date Rule
There is a deep and abiding divide between the way short fiction and novel length fiction pieces are cataloged by genre (and mainstream) bibliographers. When cataloging short fiction, the date of the original publication is always used as the "publication date" regardless of whether the original appearance was in a magazine, anthology, collection, or a chapbook (which we call "chapterbooks" at the moment). However, when cataloging novel length fiction, the date of the original serialization is not used and the date of the first book publication is used instead. This is an old (and arguably unfortunate) bibliographic convention, and we follow it. This is the main reason why we have to display SERIAL appearances on the Summary Biblio pages: otherwise many (perhaps most) ISFDB users who are not familiar with this convention would never check the Title page and assume that the first appearance of Skylark was in 1946 etc.

The reasons for this divide are twofold. First, serially published novels are/were often extensively rewritten prior to book publication (e.g. the Lensman saga), so it's natural to think of these two versions as separate works. Second, the world of book collectors is somewhat removed from the world of magazine collectors. To a book collector, a "first edition" is the first book publication of the novel in question, not its first magazine publication.

The possible difference in content supports this rule, as does the desire to display, on summary pages, both the date of first serial publication and the date of first book publication (for novels) or first non-serial publication (for short fiction).

Multiple serializations
We display all Serials for a Novel on the Summary Bibliography page, so displaying the same year for each Serial record would seem pointless. Therefore each serial tile record gets the date of its actual appearance and title records for different serial publications are not merged unless all installments are known to contain the exact same text.