What is a Digital Object Identifier (DOI)?
A DOI, or Digital Object Identifier, A DOI is a persistent identifier (PID) for a piece of content online, such as a journal article, that is made up of a series of letters, numbers and/or symbols. It is is used as a reference code to permanently identify an electronic book or article and link to it on the internet. The DOI helps in idenfitification of the article as each article will have a seperatre individual DOI. It assists readers locate the document, even if the physical location of the item has changed. DOIs for an item are permanent and stable.
How do I get a DOI for my article?
DOIs for an article can be sought from a DOI registration agency, for example Crossref. Crossref is a not-for-profit membership organization that makes research outputs easy to find and linke to. When a document is registered with Crossref it includes the DOI and basic bibliographic metadata for the article.
What are the benefits of a DOI?
The main advantage of a DOI is that it is a persistent reference. The DOI will direct a reader to its associated document forever. A URL may change, and web resources can dissapear off the internet, a DOI continues to point to the same resource.
The metadata recorded in the DOI is also machine-readable; this can make the publication more discoverable: researcher can use the metadata associated with a DOI to find the itme. Publishers assign DOIs to ensure that researchers can locate the item. DOIs also help authors and publishers track citations for the work.
How do I find a DOI for an Article?
The DOI is will be found in the bibliographic information or metadat for any document or publication. For a book, you should check the first pages near the copyright information, or for an article, the DOI info will be in the footnote for the article.
If you are having problems finding the DOI on the actual document, you can look it up using information like the
the article or book name, or the names of the authors - searching for those on a DOI search site like CrossRef.org
Not all documents will have a DOI, as it is a fairly recent concept. General interest books, popular items and trade publiations may not have their own DOI.
What sort of item can get a DOI
Various published items can get their own DOI, including Scholarly materials journal articles, books, ebooks, etc and datasets.
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