I believe the problem is you don t have unique IDs. If your HTML is similar to this:

<div class="tabs">
 <ul>
  <li><a href="tab1.htm">Tab1</a></li>
  <li><a href="tab2.htm">Tab2</a></li>
 </ul>
</div>

The Tab plugin will load both of the pages (tab1.htm and tab2.htm) into the current page. And since the first tab has both #title and #role jQuery stops searching for a duplicate (rightly so). So, the easy solution would be to make them classes, then have the show function target the selected tab and call the focus and autocomplete plugin.

$(function(){
 $(".tabs").tabs({
  show: function(e, ui) {
   $(ui.panel)  // target the current tab contents
    .find( .title ).focus().end()
    .find( .role ).autocomplete(
      "/profile/autocomplete",
      {
       delay:10,
       minChars:1,
       matchSubset:1,
       matchContains:1,
       cacheLength:10,
       onItemSelect:selectItem,
       onFindValue:findValue,
       formatItem:formatItem,
       autoFill:true
      }
     );
  }
 });
});

And to answer a question you had in a comment, a callback is basically what you want to happen after whatever you were doing is complete. For example, the function below will hide the element with the class hideme then once the fadeOut effect is complete, the callback function removes the element from the page (and DOM)

$( .hideme ).fadeOut( slow , function(){
 $(this).remove();
})

Also, in case you aren t familiar with .end() it allows you to chain objects. More specifically it reverts the selector back to the most recent object which in this case is ui.panel. Read more about it here and also be sure to check out .andSelf() here.

Your problem is not entirely clear from the question. I would say the $(document).ready part is definitely not needed but probably wouldn t cause any problems since I think it will run immediately.

What I m not sure about is how you are creating your tabs and particularly what you mean by "only on the first tab load, loading another tab doesn t focus the field." What exactly do you mean by load? Are the tabs being loaded via an Ajax call or do you just mean as the page renders? Do you want a specific element to be focused PER tag, or just every time a tag is loaded? (Your code says one specific field but your text is unclear).

Ok, based on your clarifications, I realize now the problem is that you have multiple instances of title and role but you are using IDs to name and reference them. In the html, you have something like this

<div id="tabs">
    <div class="tab">
        <input id="title">
        <input id="role">
    </div>
    <div class="tab">
        <input id="title">
        <input id="role">
    </div>
    ...
    etc
</div>

The problem is, the id field has to be unique across all your elements, otherwise you can only refer to one of them (not just unique per tab). So when you say $( #title ), you are only able to refer to the first element with an id of title . Many people solve this problem by adding numbers and giving ids to the tabs of tab1 , tab2 , etc and the title1 , title2 , etc. This is actually a bad idea with jquery. You should instead use classes and the very useful jquery .find() method like this:

<script type="text/javascript">
    $(function() {
        $("#tabs").tabs({
            load: function(event, ui) {
                var tab_content = $(ui.panel);
                setTimeout( function() { tab_content.find(".title").focus(); }, 500 );
                tab_content.find(".role").autocomplete(
                    "/profile/autocomplete",
                    {
                        delay:10,
                        minChars:1,
                        matchSubset:1,
                        matchContains:1,
                        cacheLength:10,
                        onItemSelect:selectItem,
                        onFindValue:findValue,
                        formatItem:formatItem,
                        autoFill:true
                    }
                );
                alert( callback );
            }
        });
    });
</script>

Still not sure if the timout on the focus is necessary. You should remove that if it was just an attempt to make something work .

Not 100% sure, but it may be because you wrap your handling code in $(document).ready(function() { ... });.