Examples
Worked examples
- Is an instance
A PMC-deposited article supplied as JATS XML by a publisher.
- Is an instance
An Erudit-hosted Canadian humanities journal article in JATS XML.
Counter-examples
Looks similar, but isn't
- Not an instance
A bibliographic record in CSL JSON is not JATS — it has no full-text body.
- Not an instance
A PDF rendition of an article is not JATS.
- Not an instance
A BITS-encoded book chapter is not JATS proper, even though BITS is a JATS-derived sister vocabulary reusing much of the same tag structure.
Editorial commentary
JATS evolved from the NLM Journal Archiving and Interchange DTD (2003-onwards) and was standardised as ANSI/NISO Z39.96 in 2012, with subsequent revisions. Publishers, PMC, repositories, and CRIS systems exchange JATS XML to represent full-text articles in a tractable structured form (front matter with metadata, body with structural elements, back matter with references). JATS underpins PubMed Central, Europe PMC, and Erudit’s full-text infrastructure. Sister standards include BITS (book chapters) and STS (technical standards).
The three tag sets and what each is for
JATS is not one fixed schema but a suite of three progressively more permissive tag sets: the Archiving and Interchange (“Green”) tag set is the most permissive, designed to accept content from many different source formats for long-term archiving (PMC’s ingestion format); the Publishing (“Blue”) tag set is more constrained and normalised, intended for a publisher’s own final, cleanly-tagged output; the Authoring (“Pumpkin”) tag set is the most restrictive, intended for content created directly in JATS by an authoring or editing tool before any publisher processing. Choosing the wrong tag set for a given workflow is a common integration mistake — an archive ingesting Green-tagged content but expecting Blue-level constraints will reject otherwise-valid submissions.
JATS4R and CRediT-in-JATS
JATS4R (“JATS for Reuse”) is a NISO-hosted initiative publishing best-practice recommendations for using JATS consistently enough that downstream reusers (aggregators, text-mining tools, archives) don’t each have to handle idiosyncratic tagging choices. One concrete JATS4R-aligned use is embedding structured CRediT contributor-role data directly in JATS XML via the role element with a CRediT taxonomy URI, letting a contributor’s specific role (e.g. Conceptualization, Formal analysis) travel with the article’s machine-readable metadata rather than living only in free-text acknowledgements.
References
- ANSI/NISO Z39.96-2019, JATS: Journal Article Tag Suite.
- NISO, ‘JATS for Reuse’ (jats4r.niso.org).
Also known as
Journal Article Tag Suite · ANSI/NISO Z39.96
Machine-readable encodings
Use in your systems
<role vocab="credit"
vocab-identifier="https://casrai.org/dictionary/"
vocab-term="JATS XML"
vocab-term-identifier="https://casrai.org/dictionary/term/jats-xml" />{
"@context": "https://schema.org",
"@type": "DefinedTerm",
"@id": "https://casrai.org/dictionary/term/jats-xml",
"name": "JATS XML",
"identifier": "https://casrai.org/dictionary/term/jats-xml",
"description": "Journal Article Tag Suite (ANSI/NISO Z39.96): an XML vocabulary for describing the textual content and metadata of scholarly journal articles, comprising tag sets for archival (Green), publishing (Blue), and authoring (Pumpkin) use cases.",
"inDefinedTermSet": "https://casrai.org/dictionary/domain/research-info-systems#set",
"url": "https://casrai.org/dictionary/term/jats-xml",
"sameAs": [
"Journal Article Tag Suite",
"ANSI/NISO Z39.96"
],
"license": "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/",
"publisher": {
"@id": "https://casrai.org/#organization"
},
"author": {
"@id": "https://casrai.org/#editorial-team"
},
"datePublished": "2026-05-21T02:16:02",
"dateModified": "2026-08-22T15:38:30",
"inLanguage": "en-GB",
"isAccessibleForFree": true
}
