Demystifying Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs)
What are Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs) and Why Should I Care?
DOIs are unique persistent identifiers for published objects—journal articles, conference proceedings, reports,
working papers, studies etc. Although they serve a different purpose, they are a little like the barcode numbers
you find on groceries or the ISBNs found in books which both identify the product and contain metadata about
the product.
You can use DOIs for sharing and locating journal articles as well as for creating stable URLs (persistent
links) to articles and other items. If you’ve ever clicked a URL on a reference page and found that it no longer
works, it’s likely because the URL contained session information or the item was moved to another location.
Unlike URLs which point to file locations, DOI based URLs point to content and remain associated with the item
even if a web link expires or an article moves to another database.
DOIs make it easy to share articles without posting pdfs in your course site or using eReserves. There are no
copyright issues when you direct students to articles via links and because DOIs link to articles and not
databases, online students who use other libraries can access many articles without signing in to the Welch
Library.
What Do I look For?
DOIs can usually be found on article landing pages. In many journals they can also be found in the pdf version
of an article (typically in the article header) and in article citation information. You can also look for DOIs with
Google (type the article title followed by a space and then the letters DOI) or using the DOI lookup tool
(http://www.crossref.org/guestquery/). Note that searching by article title typically works best.
DOI on article
landing page
DOIs pointing to journal articles begin with a 10 and contain a prefix and a suffix separated by a backslash.
The prefix is a unique number of four or more digits assigned to organizations; the suffix, assigned by the
publisher, contains identification information assigned by the publisher. For example the DOI components of
this article are as follows: 10.1111/j.1467-8519.2012.01991.x
10
1111
J
1467-8519
2012
01991.x
indicates DOI refers to a journal article
indicates publisher (Wiley)
indicates Wiley journal article
indicates e-ISSN
indicates year of publication
indicates the article tracking number
Center for Teaching and Learning
Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health
tinyurl.com/jhsphtoolkit
Demystifying Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs)
How Do I Use DOIs?
A. Use DOIs to create a stable URL (persistent link) to a journal article
1. Locate the article’s DOI on the article landing page or pdf (you can also search using Google or other
search tools—see below)
2. Type http://dx.doi.org/ (this points to the DOI proxy server)
3. Paste or type the article’s DOI following the backslash after org: http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.14678519.2012.01991.x
You now have a URL that points directly to an article and not the article’s location in a database
B. Use DOI tools to locate articles
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Locate articles by DOI by creating a link—type http://dx.doi.org/ and then the DOI
Locate articles by DOI using Google (type the letters DOI followed by a space and then the DOI itself
into Google search)
Locate articles by title using the DOI lookup tool (http://www.crossref.org/guestquery/)
Locate articles by title using Google (type the title followed by a space and then the letters DOI)
Locate articles by pasting a reference list in CrossRef’s Simple Text Query box
(http://www.crossref.org/SimpleTextQuery/) *You need to register for a free account to use this service
Locate articles by PMID (http://www.pmid2doi.org/)
C. Use DOIs to share articles
Because DOIs are unique and persistent, if you want to suggest an article to a colleague or student, you can
provide them with the DOI instead of the full author, title, and publication information.
FAQs
Q: Do all articles have DOIs?
A: Not yet. DOIs are used for 85% of academic articles and more are added daily. More than 84 million
DOIs have been assigned to recent and older and articles (often articles published since1990) but some
digital libraries like JSTOR are not yet using DOIs.
Q: Some DOIs are very long. Do I need to type the whole thing when I’m creating a URL?
A: You can shorten a long DOI using ShortDOI (http://shortdoi.org/). ShortDOI will create a new
shortened DOI, or return the existing shortDOI if one has already been created. Applications which
resolve DOI names will treat the shortDOI identically to the original.
Q: What else can I do with a DOI?
A: For more DOI tools see CrossRef Labs (http://labs.crossref.org/). To learn more about the DOI system,
see the DOI factsheet (http://www.doi.org/factsheets/DOIKeyFacts.html).
Center for Teaching and Learning
Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health
tinyurl.com/jhsphtoolkit