Publication patterns: Frequency of publication

When creating a publication pattern the first thing you need to set is the “Publication cycle” which records how often an issue of the serial is published. This frequency is specified by a “Cycle length” and the “No. of issues published per cycle”.

For example, to define a publication that is published once a month (12 issues per year). The Cycle length would be 1 month and the number of issues published per cycle would be 1.

The Cycle length is set by choosing the time units (day, week, month, year) and the number of those units in the cycle. The “No. of issues published per cycle” is a simple number.

To give some examples:

Daily publication (one issue per day):

Cycle length Time unit = Day
Cycle length number of days = 1
No. of issues published per cycle = 1

Monthly publication (one issue per month):

Cycle length Time unit = Month
Cycle length number of months = 1
No. of issues published per cycle = 1

Biweekly publication (one issue every 2 weeks):

Cycle length Time unit = Week
Cycle length number of weeks = 2
No. of issues published per cycle = 1

Quarterly publication (four issues per year):

A quarterly publication is an example where the publication cycle can be defined in multiple ways. It can be regarded as either “four issues per year” or “one issue every three months”. So we have options:

Cycle length Time unit = Year
Cycle length number of years = 1
No. of issues published per cycle = 4

OR

Cycle length Time unit = Month
Cycle length number of months = 3
No. of issues published per cycle = 1

Both of these are correct and will work, but they come with slightly different options when defining the day or date on which issues are published. See the documentation on Days of publication for more information on this. Because eventually a day of publication will need to be specified for each of the “issues per cycle” it is usually simpler to define publication cycles with smaller issues per cycle which in turn means it is less work if you pick the more granular time unit when you have multiple options - so in this case using Month as the Cycle length Time unit (with 1 issue per cycle) likely to be the simplest approach, even though using Year (with 4 issues per cycle) will also work.