Publication Identifier 3: DOI

A Digital Object Identifier (DOI) is a kind of publication identifier used to uniquely identify online objects such as journal articles or data sets.

All of us have names and other identifying characteristics and titles that could be common to several thousands of people.  But each person has an identifying tag, including national number, social security number, or ID number, which is unique to only that special person.

The identifying tag assigned for each separate edition and variation (except reprintings) of a publication is called “publication identifier” that helps in finding information on an article or publication using a set of codes.

There are several types of publication identifier. Some of these are discussed in this article:

• International Standard Book Number (ISBN)
• International Standard Serial Number (ISSN)
• Digital Object Identifier (DOI)

The first two identifiers have been discussed in previous blog posts where you can read in CIKD website through the link 1 and link 2.

Digital Object Identifier (DOI)

A DOI is just like a social security number for a digital item (journal article, data file, presentation file, etc.).

Understanding a DOI is important when doing specific research. It is a unique code for each article that is like a fingerprint for that article. The DOI acts as a barcode to identify articles online.

DOI code makes it easier to search for specific magazines and scientific articles in indexing databases and large data sets, e.g. on the Internet.

The developer and administrator of the DOI system is the International DOI Foundation (IDF), which introduced it in 2000.

The DOI system is implemented through a federation of registration agencies coordinated by the IDF. By late April 2011 more than 50 million DOI names had been assigned by some 4,000 organizations and by April 2013 this number had grown to 85 million DOI names assigned through 9,500 organizations.

A DOI normally consists of numbers, letters and other punctuation. It will look like this:

Benefits of DOI

• DOI ensures e the international standardization of scholarly article/research paper.
• DOI helps scholars to easily locate the research paper from your citation
• DOI enables every published article to cite properly, thus provides accurate number of citations and also increase the visibility of the published work. This increases the impact factor of the author and journal as well.
• Resolvable DOIs provide easy online access to research data for discovery, attribution and reuse
• DOIs identify content permanently. And as they are coupled with metadata, they can be modified over time to keep track of the locations and characteristics of the objects they identify, both for publisher and authors.
• As an author you need to make sure that you publish your research in journal, which provides DOI.

Anatomy of a DOI
Every DOI has three parts:

• Resolving Web Address. Like web addresses (URLs), DOIs enable research output to be discoverable and accessible. Online publishing and digital archiving have made them almost a necessity for scholarship, and they have become the de facto standard for identifying research output.
• The prefix is the beginning of a unique, alphanumeric ID that irrefutably represents a digital object, and as such it creates an actionable, interoperable, persistent link to the work. The prefix is almost always associated with the entity or organization, and can allow users to trace the digital material back to its source.
• The final part of the alphanumeric ID is unique to its assigned object.  Integrity of DOIs are guaranteed because they do not rely alone on URLs and the web’s DNS (Domain Name System) servers for resolution. A DOI, then, is both an online location and a unique name and description of a specific digital object. Moreover, while the DOI base infrastructure is a species of the Handle System, DOIs run on a managed global network dedicated to their resolution, according to Indiana Libraries website.