A periodical publication, or just periodical, is a published work that appears in a new edition on a regular schedule. The most familiar examples are the newspaper, often published daily, or weekly; or the magazine, typically published weekly, monthly or as a quarterly. Other examples would be a newsletter, a literary journal or learned journal, or a yearbook.

These examples all are related to the idea of an indefinitely continuing cycle of production and publication: newspapers plan to continue publishing, not to stop after a predetermined number of editions. A novel, in contrast, might be published in monthly parts, a method revived after the success of The Pickwick Papers by Charles Dickens.^[1] This approach is called part-publication, particularly when each part is from a whole work, or a serial, for example in comic books or manga. It flourished in the middle of the nineteenth century, for example with Abraham John Valpy's Delphin Classics, and was not restricted to fiction.^[2]

The International Standard Serial Number (ISSN) is to periodical publications what the ISBN is to books: a standardized reference number.

Notes

1. ↑ Images of the Victorian book: Part publishing
2. ↑ Simon Eliot, Jonathan Rose, A Companion to the History of the Book (2007), p. 297.