Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs)
Find DOIs for almost any journal article
If we have an online subscription to the journal, a click on the DOI (Digital
Object Identifier, i.e. perpetual weblink)
will get you straight to the paper.
Either journal name (common acronyms like JACS, JOC, JPC A, PRB, JCP,
CPL,... accepted) or the journal's ISSN are required, not both. Issue
number can usually be left blank. Important: only enter last
name of first author. [The "official" lookup form resides at http://www.crossref.org/guestquery.]
How and why?
Online journals and books are great. Unfotunately, if somebody links to
the URL of an article
and the website gets reorganized, the journal changes hands, the
publisher gets bought up,...
then the URL will no longer work. Ouch!
Some years ago,
a consortium of scientific publishers stuck their heads together in an
attempt
to come up with a solution for persistent links to items
published online. This
standard is known as the Digital Object Identifier (DOI).
A useful side benefit of DOIs is that it makes it much more convenient
to link to
other online documents from within an online paper. Eventually, DOIs
might supersede conventional
journal references altogether.
A DOI basically consists of two parts separated by a slash: a prefix
(which identifies the publisher, e.g. 10.1002=Wiley, 10.1021=ACS,...),
and a suffix
which identifies the item.
How does this work in practice? A central website dx.doi.org maintains
a huge database of DOIs of
published items. If you browse to, say, http://dx.doi.org/10.1021/ja016126t,
it will look up in its database what the current URL is for this DOI
(or where to look it up
on the publisher's website) and redirect your browser there. You will
automatically get the
correct article in your browser, no matter where it is (assuming that
the DOI database
for publisher 10.1021 is up to date).
How to make DOI links for journal articles
Here follow descriptions of how to do this for some major publishers
- 10.1002 Wiley and related publishing houses (e.g. VCH).
Wiley has its own
DOI format, so does VCH. For papers from the last few years, the online
abstract page
of the paper generally has the DOI; if not, browse one level up to the
table of contents
of the journal issue. Example for a Wiley journal paper:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/jcc.1087.
Example for a VCH paper:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/1521-3765(20000901)6:17<3287::AID-CHEM3287>3.0.CO;2-J.
- 10.1006 Academic Press (IDEAL). The structure of an
IDEAL DOI is
as follows: 10.1006/jour.year.msnumber, where "jour" is a 4-character
journal identifier,
"year" is the 4-digit Gregorian calendar year, and "msnumber" the
manuscript ID. Example:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1006/jmsp.1993.1161
UPDATE: all Academic Press journals have been absorbed by
Elsevier. While the 10.1006 DOIs shoudl keep working, future papers in
these journals will presumably have 10.1016 DOIs.
- 10.1007 Springer Verlag. ["Verlag"=German for
'Publishing House'.]
Based on PIIs like Elsevier's.
Example: http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s002140050256.
- 10.1016 Elsevier Science. The general format for an
Elsevier
DOI URL is http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/ARTICLE-PII, where ARTICLE-PII
stands
for the article's Published Item Identifier. The PII can be found on
the
online abstract page, or on the first page of the fulltext paper
(hardcopy
or PDF). It has the form Sxxxx-xxxx(yy)zzzzz-c, where xxxx-xxxx is the
8-digit
ISSN (International Systematic Serial Number) of the journal, yy are
the
last two digits of the year, zzzzz is an article number within that
year of the journal, and c is a checksum digit. Example: for the
article
with PII number S1386-1425(00)00450-9, the DOI URL becomes
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/S1386-1425(00)00450-9.
(Note that Elsevier articles
are generally "served up" from
an external provider called sciencedirect.com.)
- 10.1017 Cambridge University Press.
- 10.1021 American Chemical Society (ACS). Every ACS
article is uniquely defined by
a 9-character article identifier (e.g. ja016126t), where the first two
characters are the journal
abbreviation, the next six digits the paper number within the journal
(assigned by the journal editors upon receipt of the submitted paper),
and a 1-character checksum.
The complete DOI URL is then simply
http://dx.doi.org/10.1021/ARTICLE-IDENTIFIER,
e.g. http://dx.doi.org/10.1021/ja016126t.
Note: DOIs for ASAP (online pre-publication) and the final
published article are identical, so a DOI link in your online
list of publications
can be made as soon as the paper hits the ACS ASAP site, and does not
need to be updated afterwards.
- 10.1038 NATURE and daughter journals. Final part of DOI
is 3-letter code of journal followed by sequantial article number.
Example: http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/nsb889.
- 10.1039 Royal Society of Chemistry (RSoC). [Updated: kudos to Richard Kidd, RSoC
editorial production] Papers published after 1997 have unique
8-character identifiers, e.g. a904129j. The DOI URL then becomes simply
http://dx.doi.org/10.1039/ARTICLE-IDENTIFIER, e.g.,
http://dx.doi.org/10.1039/a904129j.
Papers from the digitized RSoC archive have 12-character IDs of the
form jjyyyvvtpppp, where jj is a journal code (P1 = Perkin Transactions
1, F2 = Faraday Transactions 2, well you get the idea), yyy are
the last three digits of the year, vv is the volume, t is a type code
(F=front matter, B=back matter, 0=paginated, i.e., all articles and
some other material), and pppp is a 4-digit page number left-padded
with zeroes as necessary. Example: http://dx.doi.org/10.1039/F29888401263
points to J. Chem. Soc. Faraday 2, 84, 1263 (1988).
- 10.1046 Blackwell Publishers. Details to follow.
- 10.1055 G. Thieme Verlag (Synthesis).Structure:
s-YEAR-XXXXX, where XXXXX is a 5-digit article code.
- 10.1063 American Institute of Physics. The DOI of recent
articles (example:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1063/1.1385363)
can be found on
the online abstract of the paper. However, AIP offers a very convenient
alternative (a kind-of "OpenURL avant-la-lettre"):
http://link.aip.org/link/?jou/vol/firstpage, where "jou" is the
three-letter journal abbreviation
(e.g. jcp for Journal of Chemical Physics), "vol" is the volume number
and "firstpage" the first
page number. Example: http://link.aip.org/link/?jcp/115/2051
will link to J. Chem. Phys. 115, 2051 (2001).
- 10.1073 PNAS (Proceedings of the National Academy of
Sciences [USA]). pnas.XXXXXXXXX, where XXXXXXXXX is a 9-digit
manuscript number.
- 10.1074 Journal of Biological Chemistry. Structure:
jbc.MXXXXXXXXX, where XXXXXXXXX is a 9-digit manuscript number.
- 10.1080 Taylor and Francis. This publisher uses
15-character PIIs like Elsevier; again,
the PII can generally be found on the online abstract of the journal
paper or on the first page
of the printed paper.
An example DOI URL is http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/002689799163172
- 10.1083 Rockefeller University Press (e.g. Journal of
Cell Biology)
- 10.1092 Laser Pages Publishing (=Israel Journal of [fill
in subject]). Structure: e.g. V0Q8-T3XM-N68W-D8NL.
- 10.1093 Oxford University Press, EMBO (European
Molecular Biology Organisation). Structure:
emboj/aaaXXX, where emboj stands for EMBO Journal and aaaXXX is a
3-letter, 3-digit article code.
- 10.1103 American Physical Society. Example: http://dx.doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevA.68.021801.
As you see, JournalName.Volume.ArticleNumber. Like for AIP, an
alternative URL is given as follows: http://link.aps.org/abstract/PRA/v68/e021801.
- 10.1107 International Union of Crystallography (e.g.
Acta Crystallographica series). Uses PIIs in same way as Elsevier (see
above).
- 10.1126 SCIENCE magazine. Structure: science.XXXXXXX,
where XXXXXXX is a 7-digit article code.
- 10.1161 American Heart Association.
- 10.1182 American Society of hematology (e.g. the journal
Blood).
Some relevant websites
Comments or suggestions? Write comartin@wicc.weizmann.ac.il
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