To change a publication without necessarily forcing replicas to re-register and get a full refresh of the data you can use the OR REPLACE option in the CREATE PUBLICATION statement, see CREATE [OR REPLACE] PUBLICATION.

If you do not use the OR REPLACE option, any time you want to change a publication, you must drop that publication and re-create it. When a publication is dropped and re-created, replicas must re-register for that publication and must get a full refresh of the data.

When you use the OR REPLACE option, you can change the definition of an existing publication without dropping and re-creating the publication and replicas can continue getting incremental refreshes instead of being forced to get a full refresh of the data.

Using the OR REPLACE option does not guarantee that replica databases will not require a full refresh of data when a publication is changed. Some changes to a publication might be significant enough that the replicas will have to get a full refresh of data. Also, not all changes can be applied by using the OR REPLACE option, for example, the OR REPLACE option does not allow you to change the publication argument list. In these cases, you must drop and re-create the publication, and replica databases must re-register and get a full refresh of the data.