D-O-I & Y-O-U

By Tim McIndoo, Dissertation Editor

A reference tells us who wrote what–when–where (author, year, title of article, journal, volume, issue, page range). If we take those data to a large scholarly library and attack the journal stacks, chances are good we’ll find it. But how slow and cumbersome!

In the 21st century, filing and retrieving scholarly articles (including abstracts) has become much simpler and much faster. That’s because all the standard data (author, year, title, etc.) are now commonly encoded into a unique, permanent, alphanumeric string called a digital object identifier or DOI. Here’s what a reference looks like with the DOI in position after the period that follows the page range: 

Nance, M. A. (2007). Comprehensive care in Huntington’s disease: A physician's perspective. Brain Research Bulletin, 72(2-3), 175-178. doi:10.1016/j.brainresbull.2006.10.027

(As you see, there is no space after the colon and no period after the last DOI digit.)

There are now three ways the DOI can locate an article without anyone having to traipse over to the library and search the stacks:

• Plug the DOI into a “DOI resolver,” such as the one offered by CrossRef.org
• Add the DOI right after the slash in the Internet prefix http://dx.doi.org/, and activate your browser
• Type the DOI into Google. (Just be prepared for extraneous results.)

Prior to the DOI, APA style required that articles retrieved electronically include the database and retrieval date. This information ensured that readers knew your source and how to access it. Such transparency is required no less today, but the DOI supplants both database and date (with a handful of exceptions). Now, when readers want to find something you’ve cited, they can locate it right from their computers.

These days, more and more articles are assigned a DOI. According to Crossref.org, the nonprofit organization that manages this “official registry for scholarly and professional publications,” the number is nearly 60 million. But some have been assigned retroactively—for example, print articles converted to electronic form. If an item does not have a DOI, do look for it at http://www.crossref.org/guestquery/ and then add it to your reference entry.  

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