<role>
Role or Function Title of Contributor
Title or role of a contributor to a work (for example, editor-in-chief, chief scientist, illustrator, research associate, conceptualization).
Remarks
What a Contributor Does: The role of a contributor may be relative to acquiring the data, performing the research, writing the paper, data visualization, or even an organizational or supervisional role. As an enabling standard, JATS is agnostic on this point, and a publisher, archive, aggregator, or other JATS user may identify <role> elements for contributors as they choose.
Who can Take a Role: In JATS, roles may be recorded for primary contributors (<contrib>, <contrib-group>, or <collab>), inside bibliographic citations for cited contributors (<element-citation>, <mixed-citation>, or <person-group>), inside a signature block (<sig-block>), or inside the descriptions of referenced materials (<product>, <related-article>, or <related-object>).
Content of Role: The content of a <role> element may be the name of a role, possibly recorded as a CRediT taxonomic term, the translation of such a term into another language, free text, a CRediT term with “free-text qualifiers”, or a term from a non-CRediT taxonomy.
CRediT Contributor Roles: The CRediT (Contributor Roles Taxonomy) Taxonomy (https://dictionary.casrai.org/Contributor_Roles) has been written to better define and communicate the different kinds of contributor roles in research outputs, and more and more publishers are defining the role of their contributors and collaborations. JATS therefore needs to be able to:
- Attach role information to a contributor (<contrib>);
- Support multiple roles for a single contributor;
- Support CRediT terms to describe this role, but also non-CRediT terms as well as free-text qualifiers to terms; and
- Be able to specify the term source (such as CRediT).
Role Attributes Record Taxonomy: If the content of the <role> element is a term from a controlled vocabulary (ontology, taxonomy, term-list, vocabulary, industry glossary, or other known source), the vocabulary attributes should be used to record that source. This source is typically a formal ontology or taxonomy such as CRediT. Four attributes can be used in this Tag Set to identify a term from such a controlled vocabulary:
vocab | Name of the controlled or uncontrolled vocabulary, taxonomy, ontology, index, database, or similar that is the source of the term. For example, for a role, a value might be the CRediT taxonomy (“credit”) or MESH Headings (“mesh”). For an uncontrolled term, the value might be merely the word “uncontrolled”. |
|---|---|
vocab-identifier | Unique identifier of the vocabulary, such as (but not limited to) a URI or DOI. For example, for Dublin Core (DCC), the identifier may be http://dublincore.org/documents/2012/06/14/dces/. For CRediT, the identifier may be https://dictionary.casrai.org/Contributor_Roles. |
vocab-term | The content of the element is the display version of the vocabulary or taxonomic term. The @vocab-term attribute holds the canonical version of the same term, as it appears in the vocabulary. For example, if the attribute value was
“Writer — original draft”, the element might contain the display text “Author”. Character Caution: Characters such as Ndash are used in the canonical CRediT names, and they may also be used in the content of the <role> element.
But General Entities (such as –) should not be used in the value of this attribute; inside the @vocab-term value, use the Unicode character reference “—” for an Ndash. |
vocab-term-identifier | Unique identifier of the term within a specific vocabulary, such as (but not limited to) an item number, an accession number, a URI, a DOI, etc. |
CRediT Best Practice: The content of the <role> is the text the JATS creator wants for search and display, and can thus be
any text, such as “deep sea diver”. But when the named role is
described in the CRediT taxonomy, Best Practice is to point to the CRediT
contributor role using the vocabulary attributes. CRediT roles include, for example, “Conceptualization” (ideas; formulation or evolution of overarching research goals and aims),
“Data curation” (management activities to annotate [produce metadata], scrub data and maintain research data [including software code, where it is necessary for interpreting the data itself] for initial use and later reuse), or
“Writing – original draft” (creation and/or presentation of the
published work, specifically writing the initial draft). Thus while the content of the <role> might be a simple word like “author” or
“writer”, the
vocabulary attributes can make a finer distinction, tying the role to a CRediT term such as
“Writing — original draft”.
Attributes
Content Model
<!ELEMENT role (#PCDATA %role-elements;)* >
Expanded Content Model
(#PCDATA | bold | fixed-case | italic | monospace | overline | roman | sans-serif | sc | strike | underline | ruby | sub | sup | named-content | styled-content)*
Description
Any combination of:
- Text, numbers, or special characters
- Emphasis Elements
- Baseline Change Elements
- <named-content> Named Special (Subject) Content
- <styled-content> Styled Special (Subject) Content
This element may be contained in:
Example 1
As part of contributor information:
...
<contrib-group content-type="conference-editors">
<contrib contrib-type="editor">
<name name-style="western">
<surname>Herrera</surname>
<given-names>Gerardo</given-names>
</name>
<role>Conference Editor</role>
</contrib>
</contrib-group>
......
<contrib-group>
<contrib contrib-type="author">
<name name-style="western">
<surname>Foster</surname>
<given-names>Bill</given-names>
<prefix>Rep.</prefix>
</name>
<role>(IL-14)</role>
</contrib>
</contrib-group>
...Example 2
As part of contributor information, with CRediT taxonomy shown:
... <contrib-group> <contrib> <string-name><given-names>Barbara</given-names> <surname>Johnston</surname></string-name> <role vocab="CRediT" vocab-identifier="http://dictionary.casrai.org/Contributor_Roles" vocab-term="Conceptualization" vocab-term-identifier="http://dictionary.casrai.org/Contributor_Roles/Conceptualization" degree-contribution="lead">study designer</role> </contrib> <contrib> <string-name><given-names>Brooke</given-names> <surname>Jackson</surname></string-name> <role vocab="CRediT" vocab-identifier="http://dictionary.casrai.org/Contributor_Roles" vocab-term="Writing — Original Draft" vocab-term-identifier="http://dictionary.casrai.org/Contributor_Roles/Writing_%E2%80%93_original_draft" degree-contribution="lead">writer</role> </contrib> </contrib-group> ...
Example 3
Special characters in CRediT attribute values need to be given as Unicode character references. In narrative text, Unicode character references, general entities, or characters may be used.
...
<contrib-group>
<contrib>
<string-name><given-names>Anne</given-names> <surname>Berns</surname></string-name>
<role vocab="CRediT"
vocab-identifier="http://dictionary.casrai.org/Contributor_Roles"
vocab-term="Writing — Original Draft"
vocab-term-identifier="http://dictionary.casrai.org/Contributor_Roles/Writing_%E2%80%93_original_draft"
degree-contribution="lead">Writing – Original Draft</role>
</contrib>
</contrib-group>
...
Example 4
Shown in a contributor group in context:
... <article-meta> <article-id pub-id-type="pmid">...</article-id> <title-group>...</title-group> <contrib-group> <contrib contrib-type="author"> <name><surname>Forster</surname> <given-names>Anne Williams</given-names> </name> <role>research physiotherapist</role> <xref ref-type="aff" rid="StLukes"/> <xref ref-type="aff" rid="RoyalInf"/> </contrib> <contrib contrib-type="author"> <name><surname>Young</surname> <given-names>John G.</given-names></name> <role>consultant physician</role> <xref ref-type="aff" rid="RoyalInf"/> </contrib> </contrib-group> <aff id="StLukes">Department of Health Care for the Elderly, St Luke’s Hospital, Bradford BD5 0NA</aff> <aff id="RoyalInf">Academic Section of Geriatric Medicine, Royal Infirmary, Glasgow G4 0SF</aff> <pub-date publication-format="print" date-type="pub" iso-8601-date="1999-03-27"> ...</pub-date> ... </article-meta> ...
Example 5
In a mixed-style bibliographic reference (punctuation and spacing preserved):
...
<ref>
<mixed-citation>
<string-name><surname>Johnson</surname>,
<given-names>D. H.</given-names></string-name>,
<string-name><surname>O’Neil</surname>,
<given-names>T. A.</given-names></string-name>,
<role>managing directors</role>.
<source>Wildlife habitat relationships in Oregon
and Washington</source>.
<publisher-loc>Corvallis, Oregon, USA</publisher-loc>:
<publisher-name>Oregon State University Press</publisher-name>;
<year iso-8601-date="2001">2001</year>.
</mixed-citation>
</ref>
...
Example 6
In an element-style bibliographic reference (punctuation and spacing removed):
...
<ref>
<element-citation>
<person-group person-group-type="director">
<name><surname>Johnson</surname>
<given-names>D. H.</given-names></name>
<name><surname>O’Neil</surname>
<given-names>T. A.</given-names></name>
</person-group>
<role>managing directors</role>
<source>Wildlife habitat relationships in Oregon
and Washington</source>
<publisher-loc>Corvallis, Oregon, USA</publisher-loc>
<publisher-name>Oregon State University Press</publisher-name>
<year iso-8601-date="2001">2001</year>
</element-citation>
</ref>
...