Help:How to work with series

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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.

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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.