Help:How to work with series

Titles in the ISFDB can be organized into series. Some series, such as Harry Harrison's Eden trilogy, for example, are composed only of novels; others, such as Le Guin's Hainish series, include both novels and short fiction.

There are three steps to working with a series. First, you must identify the title records that should be included in the series; second, you can (optionally) specify the order of those titles within the series. Finally, you can organize series into hierarchies; this enables you to specify a subseries of a given series, for example.

To specify that a specific title is in a given series, you need to display the title record and click on the "Edit Title Data" link. There is a help page for that screen. The two fields that concern series are "Series" and "SeriesNum". Entering a series name in the "Series" field will add this title to the series you name. If the series doesn't exist, this will create it. Entering a number in the "SeriesNum" field specifies where that title is in the series' internal ordering.

When you display a series record, such as the Hainish series, you will see a "Series Data" link in the navbar. Clicking on this allows you to edit the "parent series" of this series; this allows you to create a hierarchy of linked series. See the Star Trek series for an example of a large series with multiple sub-series.

Note that one thing that is not supported is having the same title belong to more than one series. This can be a problem in certain cases when a book clearly belongs to two or more series, but at this point there is no workaround.

Note also that if a series is composed only of short fiction, it will not display in the author's bibliography. Short fiction series functionality is currently under review.