Hi All,
We are looking into refactoring our article-meta structure with regards
to affiliations. We now have two practices:
1. <aff> is a child of <contrib>, no xref linking needed.
2. <aff> is a child of <article-meta> (or <contrib-group>), xref linking
needed between <contrib> and <aff>
We are a bit in doubt as to what the preferred format should be.
A quick check on jats4r.org
(https://jats4r.org/authors-and-affiliations) tells me that there is no
preferred format for the choice we are facing: "It is the
content-providerbs choice which to use".
Sometimes it is suggested to follow the strictest variant of JATS where
possible so we took a look at pumpkin (article-authoring). It appears
that (2) is not possible, as <aff> cannot be a child of <contrib-group>
or <article-meta>, even though the notes tell us that
"The linkage from a contributor to an affiliation should be made using
the ID/IDREF mechanism. The @id attribute of an <aff> element will be
pointed to from one or more <contrib> elements."
(https://jats.nlm.nih.gov/articleauthoring/tag-library/1.3d1/element/aff.html)
This means that moving away from pattern (1) is making the document less
compatible with pumpkin. Not that this is a compelling argument I guess.
What I am thinking is:
a. having <aff> separate means less redundancy in the file (argument for
choosing (2) )
b. having <aff> inside <contrib>B is closer to the semantics as I
perceive them: affiliation is primarily a property of the author, not of
the article (argument in favor of (1) ).
The demand for statistics of any kind is growing. The other day we were
asked to report numbers of articles with a first author affiliated with
some affiliation in a list of German institutes. I could report this
from an SQL copy of the data, but would like to see the JATS files with
the flexible nature of XML as the place to ask, so we are going to add
ROR if we can find it, and maybe other identifiers. This would save me
from keeping all these data in sync with SQL. But in such a case it
would be nice to have a single structure pattern to query and not multiple.
Any thoughts, anyone?
Best
Pieter
--
Pieter Lamers
John Benjamins Publishing Company
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