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Tagging Affiliations

Affiliations are commonly listed for some or all authors of an article to provide information about their company, university or other institution, and their contact information. In print, affiliations are commonly displayed in the footnote area, with footnote numbers or other symbols to identify which contributors go with which affiliations. However, in this Tag Set, each author’s affiliation is recorded as part of an individual contributor (<contrib>).
The element to hold affiliation information is <aff>, which allows many subelements, with the address and address-linking elements being most common. <aff> occurs only inside <contrib>, commonly at the end. If two or more contributors have the same affiliation, the affiliation is repeated for each contributor to which it applies inside each <contrib> element.
In some cases, one or more authors will be designated “corresponding” authors (that is, readers should contact them rather than other authors concerning the article). The <contrib> element provides the @corresp attribute, which should be set to “yes” for those authors: 
<contrib-group>
  <contrib contrib-type="author" corresp="yes">
    <name>
      <surname>Tanabe</surname>
      <given-names>Lorraine</given-names>
    </name>
    <aff>National Center for Biotechnology Information, National Library of
     Medicine, NIH, 8600 Rockville Pike, Bethesda, MD, USA</aff>
  </contrib>
  <contrib contrib-type="author">
    <name>
      <surname>Thom</surname>
      <given-names>Lynne H.</given-names>
    </name>
    <aff>Consolidated Safety Services, 10335 Democracy Lane, Suite 202,
     Fairfax, VA, USA</aff>
  </contrib>
</contrib-group>
Multiple Versions of an Affiliation
Sometimes an affiliation is present in multiple languages or multiple scripts, and care should be taken so that it does not appear to multiply the number of affiliations. (Three versions of the name of a university is not the same as three different universities.) The @id attribute that is normally placed onto the <aff> element should be placed on the alternatives wrapper element instead, to make the connection between the contributors and the affiliations.
The <aff-alternatives> element is intended to collect multiple versions of a single affiliation. Like the similar construction for graphics <alternatives>, it will be up to an application how multiple versions of a single affiliation are to be processed. The @xml:lang attributes can be used to distinguish the different affiliations for separate processing. The <aff-alternatives> element can be used to record:
  • The name of an affiliation in multiple languages (For example, a university name in Korean or Chinese-Han characters and a transliterated version of the same name in the Latin alphabet);
  • The name of an affiliation in multiple language/script combinations (For example, a university name in Japanese [xml:lang="ja-Jpan" for Han + Hiragana + Katakana] and the same university name written in Kanji [xml:lang="ja-Hani"]);
  • An alternate affiliation for sorting or searching (For example, a name in French with accented letters, such as an “é”, and a plain lower-ASCII version of the same name with the “é” replaced by “e”. The attribute @specific-use attribute can be used to indicate that the ASCII version is only for “sort”, not for display.); or
  • An alternate name indexing (For example, an XML database may need to record all the name variants found for an individual from “President Thomas Jefferson” to “Long Tom”, with @specific-use used to mark “primary” and “index”.). 
... 
<article-meta>
 <title-group>...</title-group>
 <contrib-group>
  <contrib>
   <name><surname>Smythe-Barring</surname>
    <given-names>John</given-names></name>
   <aff-alternatives id="aff1">
    <aff> 
     <institution xml:lang="ja-Jpan">国立言語学博物館</institution>
    </aff>
    <aff>
     <institution xml:lang="en">National Museum of 
      Linguistics</institution>
    </aff>
   </aff-alternatives>
  </contrib>
 </contrib-group>
 ...
</article-meta>
...