A Brief Explanation of DOIs

You may have noticed strange codes that look something like 10.1000/182 appearing on some journal articles and e-books. These codes are DOIs – Digital Object Identifiers. A DOI is a unique, persistent alphanumeric string used to identify content on the Internet that can be defined as intellectual property. For example, many online journal articles and electronic books have a DOI assigned to them by their publisher. A DOI can also be used to identify audio and images. The nice thing about DOIs is that even though the location of an electronic document may change, say if an e-journal moved its content to a new publisher, the DOI will remain the same and the content can be found at the new location. A DOI will never change, so it can be used as a permanent link to an electronic document. Owing to their stability, and because many articles are now only published online, it is speculated that DOIs will soon be standard information included in reference lists.

If you have a DOI and need to locate the item it refers to, you can use a DOI Resolver. There is one available at the DOI website http://dx.doi.org/, and another from CrossRef http://www.crossref.org/. You can also add the URL “http://dx.doi.org/” to the beginning of a DOI string directly in your web browser search box. (Note: DOI strings always begin with the number 10.) Use caution when searching for a DOI in search engines like Google as you may be led to an article that references the DOI you’re looking for, not the original work.

Alternatively, if you have an article or book’s citation information and want to find out the DOI that belongs to it, you can use CrossRef’s DOI LookUp http://www.crossref.org/guestquery.