Introduction

These Tagging Guidelines describe PubMed Central's preferred XML tagging style for journal article submissions in the NLM Journal Publishing DTD. Users of this document should have an understanding of XML and a basic familiarity with the NLM Journal Publishing DTD.

The Guidelines now include style rules for data tagged in both versions 2.3 and 3.0 of the NLM Journal Publishing DTD. Where style rules differ between the two versions, the rules are displayed in colored boxes to distinguish them. The "DTD Version Rule Selection" controls on the left navigation menu allow you to turn on or off all rules for either version. Additionally, in each item where the rules differ, there are links to toggle the version rules on and off.

The Tagging Guidelines are described in three separate sections. Each section describes separate rules that must be followed when creating PMC-style compliant XML. Many of the rules are related, but none are duplicated from one section to another.

In addition to these three sections, all updates to the Tagging Guidelines are documented in the Update History.

These style rules apply to structured data tagging at a very broad level and include formatted text, math, and special characters.

This section describes specific parts of XML documents like figures and author/affiliation relationships. It references specific elements and includes examples of XML tagging.

This section describes style rules for specific XML elements and their attributes. Only elements for which PMC has a style rule are described in this section. Refer to the Tag Library for descriptions of all elements available in the DTD.

Occasionally the Tagging Guidelines and the Tag Library have different tagging instructions or examples. In those cases, tag submissions to PMC according to the examples in the Tagging Guidelines which always describe PMC’s preferred style.

PMC has provided the following tools and resources for use with the Tagging Guidelines.

This web-based tool provides a detailed report of all items in an XML file that do not comply with PMC style. The report will list items as either warnings or errors.

The Style Checker is also available for download as a set of XSL stylesheets. The downloadable version has the same functionality as the web-based version but it can be run locally. If you are unfamiliar with running XSL stylesheets against XML data, please use the web-based version.