firstarticle

Firstarticle is a generic label used in documentation, data sets, and software examples to refer to the first article in a sequence. It is not the title of a known work and does not denote a specific publication by itself; instead, it serves as a placeholder name.

In publishing workflows, the term may appear in templates or mock records to illustrate ordering, metadata fields, or citation syntax. The first article in a journal issue or in a collection is conceptually the opening item, but the label 'firstarticle' is typically used only in illustrative contexts rather than in official bibliographies.

In information systems, firstarticle can function as a key, an identifier, or a fixture value within sample data. For example, a database of articles might include a field called id or title where firstarticle represents the item with the lowest publication date or earliest position in a list.

Variants include first_item, first_article, or 001, depending on the software and conventions in use. The exact meaning depends on the context, the data model, and the sorting or indexing rules applied to the collection.

See also: article, metadata, bibliographic database, data fixtures.