Examples
Worked examples
- Is an instance
A journal article that appears in 'early online' or 'online first' form in March, then in a print/final issue in June, has a date of publication of March -- the online date takes precedence.
- Is an instance
A book with a print edition released before its ebook counterpart takes the print release date as its date of publication, since print preceded online availability for that title.
Counter-examples
Looks similar, but isn't
- Not an instance
The date a manuscript first appears as a preprint is not the date of publication -- that date only attaches once the work has been formally published by a publisher.
- Not an instance
An exhibition of a work, or its inclusion within a separate compiled work, does not itself count as publication for dating purposes.
Editorial commentary
Date of publication is the date the work is made available to the public by a publisher, including by means of an electronic retrieval system. In practice this generally means the “early online” or “online first” date should be taken as the date of publication, rather than the later date a print or final-issue version appears, because that is the earliest point at which the version of record became publicly available.
Exceptions and edge cases
The relationship can run the other way for some works, usually books: a print edition is sometimes made available before the corresponding online or ebook edition, in which case the earlier print release date is the date of publication. Publication in this operational sense specifically excludes exhibition of the work, issue to the public of copies of the work as included within another work, and mere communication of the work to the public — provisos that matter mainly for non-text research outputs such as datasets, software, or physical objects, where “making available” can take several different forms that do not all count as publication. A publication date can also be presented in the form of the publisher’s nominal issue date — the volume and issue the work is assigned — as if the work had been published in print, even where the underlying availability was online-first.
Related dates worth distinguishing
Repository and CRIS metadata schemes typically separate this concept from several adjacent dates that are easy to conflate: date of online publication, date of online availability, and date of first open access. Getting the right date field populated correctly matters for embargo-period calculations, funder compliance deadlines, and citation-count normalisation, all of which are typically anchored to date of publication specifically rather than to a related but distinct date.
References
- HEFCE Open Access policy for the Research Excellence Framework, hefce.ac.uk/pubs/year/2016/201635.
Machine-readable encodings
Use in your systems
<role vocab="credit"
vocab-identifier="https://casrai.org/dictionary/"
vocab-term="Date of publication"
vocab-term-identifier="https://casrai.org/dictionary/term/date-of-publication" />{
"@context": "https://schema.org",
"@type": "DefinedTerm",
"@id": "https://casrai.org/dictionary/term/date-of-publication",
"name": "Date of publication",
"identifier": "https://casrai.org/dictionary/term/date-of-publication",
"description": "The date the work is made available to the public by a publisher, including by means of an electronic retrieval system; the earliest date the final version of record is made available on the publisher's website.",
"inDefinedTermSet": "https://casrai.org/dictionary/domain/research-lifecycle#set",
"url": "https://casrai.org/dictionary/term/date-of-publication",
"sameAs": [
"http://www.hefce.ac.uk/pubs/year/2016/201635/"
],
"license": "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/",
"publisher": {
"@id": "https://casrai.org/#organization"
},
"author": {
"@id": "https://casrai.org/#editorial-team"
},
"datePublished": "2026-05-19T19:11:02",
"dateModified": "2026-08-23T05:33:51",
"inLanguage": "en-GB",
"isAccessibleForFree": true
}
