<sec> Section

Headed group of material; the basic structural unit of the body of a document.

Usage/Remarks

A very short article may contain nothing but paragraphs (and other paragraph-level elements such as figures and tables), but most journal articles are divided into sections, each with a title that describes the content of the section, such as “Introduction”, “Methodology”, or “Conclusions”.
Sections are recursive, that is, various levels of sections are indicated by containment, not by different names for the subsections. A <sec> element may contain lower-level sections that are also tagged using the <sec> element, not tagged explicitly as <sec2>, <sec3>, <subsec1>, etc.
Attributes

Base Attributes

Models and Context
May be contained in
Description
Content Model
<!ELEMENT  sec          %sec-model;                                  >
Expanded Content Model

(title, (answer | answer-set | boxed-text | chem-struct-wrap | code | explanation | fig | graphic | media | preformat | question | question-wrap | question-wrap-group | supplementary-material | table-wrap | disp-formula | disp-formula-group | def-list | list | p | disp-quote | speech | statement | verse-group)*, (sec)*)

Tagged Sample

Nested sections in the <body>

<article dtd-version="1.3">
 <front>...</front>
 <body>
  <sec sec-type="intro">
   <title>Introduction</title>
   <p>Geriatric day hospitals developed rapidly in the United Kingdom
    in the 1960s as an important component of care provision. The model
    has since been widely applied in several Western countries. Day
    hospitals provide multidisciplinary assessment and rehabilitation
    in an outpatient setting and have a pivotal position between hospital
    and home based services ... We therefore undertook a systematic
    review of the randomized trials of day hospital care.</p>
  </sec>
  <sec sec-type="methods">
   <title>Methods</title>
   <p>The primary question addressed was ...</p>
   <sec>
    <title>Inclusion criteria</title>
    <p>We set out to identify all ...</p>
   </sec>
   <sec>
    <title>Search strategy</title>
    <p>We searched for ...</p>
   </sec>
   ...
  </sec>
 </body>
 ...
</article>
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