10.1 Rationale

The Article Authoring Tag Set (Authoring) creates a standardized format for new journal articles that can be used by authors to submit publications to journals and to archives such as PubMed Central. While in theory the document scope is the same as for the Publishing Tag Set, in practice Authoring defines elements and attributes that describe the content of typical research-style journal articles.

This is a Tag Set optimized for authorship of new journal articles, where regularization and control of content is important, and where it is useful rather than harmful to have only one way to tag a structure. Therefore, Authoring is more prescriptive than descriptive and includes many elements whose content must occur in a specified order.

Since an author is assumed to be creating and submitting an article for submission to a journal or journals, no publishing history or journal-specific information has been included in this Authoring Tag Set.

Since no assumptions can be made concerning the processing software or editorial situation that will receive an article authored in this Tag Set, tagging that forces specific formatting has also been avoided. There is no way for an author to number his/her lists explicitly, for example, or to manually number the cited references, since many journals have their own citation policies and publication styles. Numbers for the cited references must be generated by the publisher’s software to match editorial policy and established practice.

10.2 Scope

By design, this is a model for journal articles, such as the typical research article found in an STM journal, and not a model for complete journals. This Tag Set does not include an overarching model for a collection of articles. In addition, the following journal material is not described by this Tag Set:

• Company, product, or service display advertising

• Job search or classified advertising

• Calendars, meeting schedules, and conference announcements (except as these can be tagged as ordinary articles, sub-articles, or sections within articles)

• Material specific to an individual journal, such as Author Guidelines, Policy and Scope statements, editorial or advisory boards, detailed indicia, etc.

10.3 Structural Overview

The Article Authoring Tag Set defines a document that is a top-level component of a journal such as an article, a book or product review, or a letter to the editor. Each such document is composed of one or more parts; if there is more than one part, they must appear in the following order:

• Front matter (required). The article front matter contains the metadata for the article (also called article header information), for example, the article title, the names of the contributor(s), and the abstract. This is not textual front matter as appears in books, rather this is bibliographic information about the article.

• Body of the article (required). The body of the article is the main textual and graphic content of the article. This usually consists of paragraphs and sections, which may themselves contain figures, tables, sidebars (boxed text), etc.

• Back matter for the article (optional). If present, the article back matter contains information that is ancillary to the main text, such as a glossary, appendix, or list of cited references.