Monographs in series

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Monographs in series are scholarly and scientific books released in successive volumes, each of which is structured like a separate book or scholarly monograph.

In general books that are released serially (in successive parts) once a year, or less often, are called series. Publications that are released more often than once a year are known as periodicals. If the volumes can each stand on their own as a separate book, they are called monographs in series, if not they are called book sets.

The connection among books belonging to such a series can be by discipline, focus, approach, type of work, or geographic location. Examples of such series include "Antwerp working papers in linguistics" OCLC 66592270; "Early English manuscripts in facsimile" ISSN 0070-7856; Garland reference library; "Canterbury Tales Project" ISSN 1351-3435 (see The Canterbury Tales); Early English Text Society.

Libraries and indexing services handle them in various ways. The Library of Congress catalogs each part of them as an individual book with an individual call number and ISBN and a series note (technically a series added entry for the overall series, which has its ISSN, and usually a call number. As the Library of Congress receives two copies of most scholarly books as copyright deposits, it normally keeps one by individual call number and one by series call number. Most other libraries do not have that luxury and have to choose.

Medical libraries almost always keep them together as a series. The biomedical indexing service PubMed from the National Library of Medicine treat the individual volumes in such a series as if they were volumes in a journal.

In many cases each volume in such a series itself contains individual chapters or articles written by different authors, usually on the same general theme. The Library of Congress does not list each such article separately, but PubMed does.

A frequent occasion for such a themed volume is a celebration in honor of a person's scholarly work. If done at retirement, it is usually called a Festchrifte or celebration volume. If after death, it is usually called a memorial.

[edit] Selected list of series