Publication Date

• Required
• The date that appears on the book, generally in the indicia of a periodical or on the copyright page of a book. Spell out months or seasons in full, and use the full 4 digit year. If the indicia does not contain a publication date, the information can sometimes be obtained from the cover, distributor catalogs, publisher shipping lists or ads in other comics. If a published date is obtained from outside the comic itself, it should be reported in square brackets, (indicating indexer-added information that is not in the comic), and a note on the source of the data should be added to the cover Notes field. If the publication date is unknown, the copyright date should be reported instead, with a note in the cover Notes field.
• For some books "Winter 1945" is the first issue of the year while for others it's the last issue (so it could be followed by either "Spring 1945" or "Spring 1946") so it should be indexed with both years to avoid ambiguity. Check carefully to determine whether "Winter 1945-1946" or "Winter 1944-1945" is appropriate. The same applies to books dated as "Holiday 1945".
• If the publishing date in the indicia is obviously wrong (e.g. if a monthly publication has the same publishing date as the previous issue), the date in the indicia should still be indexed, with the correct date in square brackets and an explanatory note in the cover Notes field. Many publishers of serialized periodicals use publication dates that differ from copyright and/or shipping dates. In these cases, the "official" publication date from the indicia should be the date entered in the Published Date field.
• Examples:

* 1945
* January 1945
* January 7, 1945
* 7 January 1945
* Late January 1945
* January-February 1945
* December 1945-January 1946
* Spring 1945
* Winter 1945-1946
* Holiday 1945-1946
* [January 1945]
* [1945]
* [January] 1945
* [circa 1910]

NOTE: This definition is currently under vote by the Senior Editors (April 6, 2008)