Remarks

Best Practice: When it is present, this container element should take the @id that is used to tie contributors to affiliations rather than putting an @id on the individual affiliations (<aff>s) within the container.

Usage: The <aff-alternatives> element is intended to collect multiple versions of a single affiliation without appearing to multiply the number of affiliations. (Three versions of the name of a university is not the same as three different universities.) 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-letter lower-ASCII version of the same name with “é” replaced by “e” for sorting. The @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 institution from “UCLA” to “University of California Los Angeles”, with the @specific-use attribute used to mark distinctions such as “primary” and “index”.