Help:Getting Started:Verify a Publication

This page is a help or manual page for the ISFDB database. It describes standards or methods for entering or maintaining data in the ISFDB database, or otherwise working with the database. Other help pages may be found via the category below. To discuss what should go on this page, use the talk page. If, after exploring the Help system, you still have a question, please visit the Help desk and let us know. We probably know the answer, but we need your help to know what we left out of the help pages. If you are new to editing the ISFDB, please see Help:Getting Started. For more on this and other header templates, see Header templates.

If you've found that your book is already in the ISFDB, in this exact edition -- same publisher, same date, same printing -- then there's no need to enter it. You can do two useful things, though: you can update the publication with any additional information, and you can verify the publication.

Take a look at the information recorded in the ISFDB for this book. Check it against your copy. Does everything match? Is anything missing? If something is missing, it is straightforward to fix it: click on the "Edit this Pub" link on the left navbar, and you'll see a display of the record as the ISFDB has it. Go ahead and add any additional data you can see -- for help on what to put in these fields, see this page. Then click Submit Data, and your updates will be submitted for approval.

The other thing you can do is mark the book as "Verified". The "primary source" for a book is a copy of that book, and you have the primary source in your hands. You can click on "Verify this pub" in the navigation bar, and you'll see a list of reference works. You can ignore all of them except "Primary". If you are confident that every field in the publication record is accurate, based on the book you are holding, then you can check the "Verified" button against "Primary".

If you decide to do verifications, please read the publication field help in detail. There are a lot of areas where it is easy to make mistakes, and generally it's best to stick to data entry and clean up of obvious mistakes to start with. However, if you make sure you're following the verification help, then verifying the data is a tremendous help to the ISFDB.