Best Approach to Organizing Publications

Hello, any feedback would be greatly appreciated.

I’m working on a project now that has many different types of publications and each publication has many volumes. I’m trying to identify the cleanest and most efficient approach (in terms of 1) the people who will be editing and adding articles through the admin backend and 2) being able to easily query the info so that all the posts that are associated with a specific volume and issue are displayed and all volumes and issues associated with a publication are displayed and 3) scalability – the number of publications will just keep growing …

Would the best approach be to use:
1) Category and subcategories (Publications>Publication 1>Vol 1, Iss 1, etc?). I imagine this approach might get messy and hard to scroll through in the admin panel as there would be many volumes and issues associated with each publication
2) Category and subcategories with custom fields – the custom fields could capture the volume and issue for each post. I’m also thinking we could create meta boxes to make it easier for folks to add information
3) Custom post types – create a custom post type for publications and then use categories (for each publication) and custom fields (for volume and issue).

Thank you.