PubMed Data Provider Documentation: Instructions for Non-English Languages

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Instructions for Non-English Languages

Last Updated: December 5, 2003

Overview

PubMed indexes journals published in approximately 40 languages. Here is an example of a non-English language citation:

Laroche C, Lienhardt A, Boulesteix J.

[Ischemic stroke caused by neuroborreliosis]
Arch Pediatr. 1999 Dec; 6(12): 1302-5. French.
PMID: 10627902 [PubMed - indexed for MEDLINE]

The [brackets] around the article title and the language tag "French." indicate the full-text of the article is in a language other than English. The French article title can be viewed by selecting the XML display for this citation in PubMed.

Publishers submitting files with articles published in non-English languages often have specific questions about how to construct their XML files. Here are some guidelines for the submission of non-English articles.

Tags involved

The <Language> tag should contain the two-letter code for the language the article is in. If unspecified, EN (English) is the default code. See our list of Language Tag Codes, a subset of the ISO 639 standard for language codes.

The <ArticleTitle> tag should contain the article title, in English, if published in English or translated to English in the journal. Do not fill this tag if the published title is not in English or is not translated to English in the journal.

The <VernacularTitle> should contain the article title in the original language, if not in English. It is used only for Latin based alphabets; articles in non-Latin alphabets should leave this tag blank.

Rules to Remember

A good "rule of thumb" when constructing non-English language citations is to use the print version of the article as an authority on what bibliographic data should be included in the file. If English translations for titles or abstracts are not in the print article, do not include them. ArticleTitle and Author tags left blank in your XML file submission will be supplied by Language experts at the NLM when the citations are Indexed for MEDLINE.
If the full text of an article appears in more than one language in the same issue, submit multiple language tags listed in the order in which the texts appear in the journal, not in the alphabetical order of the symbols. If one of the languages is English, enter EN first. For example, an article which appears full-text in both Chinese and English should be coded as:

If the full text of an article appears in one language, but the abstract appears in two or more languages, the <Language> tag should contain only the code for the language of the full-text article.
Articles published in Russian and other Cyrillic languages may submit transliterated bibliographic data if it conforms to the NLM system transliteration, outlined in this document.
Articles in non-Latin alphabets can include transliterated author names. However, these names may be changed by Indexers based on NLM's own System of Transliteration.

Some examples:

If the print article contains...	Your XML file should contain...
a title in Japanese characters and a title in English	the English title in the <ArticleTitle> tags and empty <VernacularTitle> tags
author names in Chinese characters only	empty <Author> tags
Russian transliterated names and affiliations	names in the <Author> tags and affiliations in the <Affiliation> tags; however, you should check the transliterations against NLM's System of Transliteration and make changes if necessary.
an English abstract, but article title and author names in Cyrillic only	the English abstract and transliterated Cyrillic in <ArticleTitle> and <Author> tags. The transliteration must conform to NLM's System of Transliteration.