Section 3.2.5.5. Contents of a publication

Categories used to describe an article for publication and to include the text of an article are as follows:

The items in the PUBL category group describe the text that an author adds to the experimental data in a CIF to create a full record of the structural study for publication.

Data items in these categories are as follows:

(a) PUBL

(b) PUBL_AUTHOR

(c) PUBL_BODY

(d) PUBL_MANUSCRIPT_INCL

The data items in the PUBL category represent non-looped components of the published article, varying from the article title to the complete text of the article. Some journals such as Acta Crystallographica require specific section headers in articles, for which data items (e.g. _publ_section_comment) are provided. An alternative approach is to use the general items in this list for the article title, abstract, reference list etc. and build the individual sections of text using the items in the PUBL_BODY category.

The CIF syntax restrictions that permit only printable ASCII characters (Chapter 2.2 ) mean that authors cannot simply cut and paste text produced by commercial word-processing programs into a CIF. This might be inconvenient for the author, but while commercial word-processing programs are often convenient to use, they use proprietary and often poorly documented formats. For an archived CIF to remain readable in the long term, the use of transparent text representations, using open and well documented markup systems such as XML or , is preferred.

The authors of an article are listed separately using items in the PUBL_AUTHOR category. The entry for each author can be annotated, for example to add text that would appear as a footnote to the author's name in the published article.

The PUBL_BODY category allows the body of an article to be more highly structured than _publ_manuscript_text does. It may be used for articles that include structural data but are less formally structured than required by Acta Crystallographica Section C or Acta Crystallographica Section E.

Journals like Acta Crystallographica Section C may have a list of CIF data items that will normally be published. If an author wishes to include additional data items, they can be specified using the _PUBL_MANUSCRIPT_INCL category. Since the values of _publ_manuscript_incl_extra_item are data names, they must be placed in quotes, as in Example 3.2.5.3, for them to be parsed correctly.

Further information on the use of the data items in the PUBL category group may be found in Section 5.7.2.