JATS (Journal Article Tag Suite) is a technical standard, an initiative that defines an XML format for describing structure, semantics, and metadata for scientific digital content.

It provides a set of elements and XML attributes for describing graphic and text of journal articles content.

JATS is a technical standard based on the National Information Standards Organization (NISO) ; its current version is the Z39.96 2012 (NISO JATS 1.0).

Where does JATS appear? 

  • 60’s: National Library of Medicine of the United States (NLM) created a database of citation of medical journals known as MEDLINE.
  • 1996: PubMed was created, a  search engine of free access to MEDLINE.
  • 2000: PubMed Central (PMC) appeared, a digital repository developed by the National Center for Biotechnological Information (NCBI), which stores full-text academic articles of biomedic and of biological sciences journals of the NLM.
  • 2003 – 2008: NLM integrates 3 versions of the NLM DTD standard, from the version v1.0 to the v3.0.
  • 2012: NISO (National Information Standards Organization) integrates JATS v1.0 as the adaptation of NLM DTD v3.1, becoming the XML standard for tagging articles of journals of academic publications.

Structure of a JATS file

Front. It has the article’s metadata (article’s title, journal in which it is published, date, type of publication, copyright,etc.). It is the bibliographic information of the article and the journal in which it is published.

Body. It is the main textual and graphic content of the article. It consists of paragraphs and sections that can include figures, charts,quotes, etc.

Back. le falta el color en el original.  It has information that helps the main text, such as the glossary, appendix, and a bibliographic reference list.

See the full specification here https://jats.nlm.nih.gov

Frequent questions about JATS https://jats.nlm.nih.gov/faq.html

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