Publication date field
The Publication date field records the date that a book, periodical or other document was published.
Field details
Visibility: Public field
Field ID: publication_date
Search example: publication_date:1912
Field type: Text field with 40-character limit
Field location: Detail, Core, and Public tabs in the object cataloguing page
for library records
Catalogue tips
You can enter words and numbers into date fields. You can record either precise dates (such as 1 June 1964) or imprecise dates (such as March 1990 or 20th Century).
Dates are stored as text and can only be sorted alphabetically. If you want to sort your records by year and month or search for precise date ranges, you should enter dates in the format YYYY-MM-DD. For example, you should enter 2025-02-01 instead of 01-02-2025 or 1 February 2025.
Using the YYYY-MM-DD format means your records will be sorted like this:
2025-02-01
2025-02-02
2025-02-03
If you enter dates in the DD-MM-YYYY format and sort your records by that date field, then all the dates starting with 01 will be in order, regardless of the month, like this:
01-01-2025
01-02-2025
01-03-2025
You should use a hyphen (-) or period (.) to separate the year, month, and day. We don’t recommend using a forward slash (/) as this has a special meaning in the search index and can cause problems.
It's important to be consistent with whatever date format and punctuation you choose.
Search tips
You can search on this field with its ID:
publication_date
For example, enter publication_date:1912 into the search field to find documents that were published in the year 1912.
Note: For more advice, see Search on date fields.
