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XML format

JATS article

The publishing interchange for journal articles, separating front matter, article body, and back matter such as references and acknowledgements.

JATS organizes a scholarly article into <front>, <body>, and <back>. The model carries journal metadata, contributors, affiliations, abstracts, sections, citations, figures, tables, funding, and machine-readable references.

Deployments select a tag set and version, commonly through a public identifier and DTD. JATS itself is usually namespace-free; extension vocabularies such as MathML and XLink introduce namespaces where needed.

Constraints that bite

  • Choose the Archiving, Publishing, or Authoring tag set that matches the workflow.
  • The DTD version and article-type profile determine which structures are valid.
  • Inline and block alternatives may carry both textual and graphic representations.
  • Reference links depend on stable IDs and rid targets, so ID integrity matters across transformations.
Root element
<article>
Media type
application/xml
Extensions
.xml
Namespaces
None — unqualified elements
XMLDir label
xml

Specification: NISO JATS

A minimal valid document

Every example on this site is checked against the same parser the workspace uses, so what you see below is known to be well-formed.

jats.xml
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<article article-type="research-article" dtd-version="1.4">
  <front><article-meta><title-group><article-title>XML pipelines</article-title></title-group></article-meta></front>
  <body><sec id="s1"><title>Methods</title><p>Documents were validated before extraction.</p></sec></body>
  <back><ref-list><title>References</title></ref-list></back>
</article>

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