The top-voted answer to Is there a noun representing books, papers, magazines, and all the other things one might read? is "documents" and "literature".
I want to know how the word "publications" compares to "documents" and "literature".
Is "publications" the right word to represent books, papers, journals and magazines? If not, why not?
Publications are works that are published. The 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica defines it as:
"PUBLISHING. In the technical sense, publishing is the business of producing and placing upon the market printed copies of the work of an author"
http://encyclopedia.jrank.org/PRE_PYR/PUBLISHING.html
(However, this seems a little narrow, as it would exclude online publications (which were not known then) and hand-written manuscripts. The latter were indeed 'placed on the market' since antiquity.)
Wikipedia defines publishing as: "To publish is to make content available to the general public." and cites an international convention (Berne).
McMillan dictionary provides a long list of types of publications: http://www.macmillandictionary.com/thesaurus-category/british/types-of-published-book
Texts, or other media, may or may not be published. Whether they are or are not publication depends only on that, but not on what type of medium they are. However, often publication is meant in the more narrow sense reflected in the Britannica quote above and refers to texts only.
