Help:How to add a magazine issue to the magazine's issue grid

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Placing a magazine's editor record into a series automatically creates a magazine issue grid or adds the record to one that already exists. This only works for editor records of publications that are typed as MAGAZINE or FANZINE. The system does not create issue grids for the editor records of publications of any other type.

First you must determine whether the magazine series exists:

  1. Do a simple search, using the search form which appears on the left menu of every database page. Enter the title of the magazine, using the "Series" criterion, not the "Magazine" one.
  2. If your search comes up blank, then use the name of the magazine as the new series name. If your search comes up with a series identical to the magazine title, it's probable that a): a series for the magazine already exists, or possibly that b): there's a non-magazine series already using the same name. In case of a), use the identical title for the series as used in other issues of the magazine, but first look at a few of the publication records under the series to determine if it is the same magazine. In case of b), come up with a new name. This is usually done by parenthetically disambiguating the title, e.g. Jupiter (magazine). Occasionally a magazine will change names but remain within one series. For example, Amazing Stories was sometimes titled Amazing Science Fiction, but all issues are entered under the same series name. (This does not affect the title of the publication record.) So you may have to broaden your search in order to determine if the series exists under a different name.

Once you know whether the series exists:

  1. Go to the issue's publication record and click on the name that's in the editor field. This will lead you to the editor's summary page and where you will find a list of all of the magazine issues for which he/she has been credited as the editor. Click on the editor record of the issue that you wish to add to a grid, or if there isn't an existing one, to have the system automatically create a new grid.
  2. When the editor record of the issue is on the screen ("EDITOR" should appear in the record's Type field), click "Edit Title Data" under the Editing Tools menu.
  3. In the Series field of the editor record, enter the title of the series under which the other issues have already been added, or a new series title that you wish to add to the database.

In order to keep down the clutter on some editors' summary pages, it was decided that the editor records of certain publications and editors can be merged into annual groupings. For example, instead of twelve records for each year that John W. Campbell, Jr. was editor of Astounding/Analog, there's only one editor record for each year of his editorship. Only that one record needs to be added to the series in order for all twelve issues to appear on the magazine's grid list. It is not necessary to merge editor records into a single annual record for many titles, especially if there were only one or two issues published in any given year. Each editor record can remain as a single record which is placed into the series, and then the system will automatically add the issue to the magazine's issue grid.