publicationDate

Publication date, often represented as publicationDate in metadata schemas, is the date on which a work becomes publicly accessible or officially released. It is a key piece of bibliographic information used to cite, index, and archive materials across various media, including articles, books, datasets, and software releases.

In publishing and information management, the publication date serves to indicate when the work entered the public domain or was first made available to readers or users. It may be stored alongside other dates such as creation, revision, or embargo dates, and can be used to determine version history, priority, and search ordering. In many metadata standards, the field may be labeled datePublished, publicationDate, or similar, and is typically expressed as a calendar date or a date-time value.

Formats and time zones are considerations for publicationDate. Common practice uses ISO 8601 representations, such as YYYY-MM-DD for date-only values or YYYY-MM-DDTHH:MM:SSZ for date-time values in UTC. Some systems maintain separate fields for publicationDate and embargoDate, where access is restricted until the embargo lifts.

Differences from related dates can be important. The publication date may differ from the creation date, when a work was produced before it was publicly released, or from the release date used for marketing. In dynamic works, the publicationDate may reflect the first public access rather than subsequent updates.

Examples include a journal article with publicationDate 2023-04-12, a dataset released on 2021-09-30, or a software version published after an embargo ends.