by guest author Dan Brackmann
As a companion to Thursday’s colloquium, this month’s Resource Review highlights the Digital Object Identifier or DOI for short. One of the problems in scholarly metrics is confusion not only of authors with similar names but of articles with similar or even identical names. DOIs work to mitigate the latter by assigning to the book or article a unique identifying number, basically a social security number for the article or book. The use of DOIs is quite common already in other disciplines because it increases the accuracy of scholarly metrics. Typically, the DOI is registered by the publisher, so there is nothing additional that authors need to do except keep an eye open for publications that utilize DOIs.
You can search for DOIs through CrossRef’s metadata search at https://www.crossref.org/ using the title or the author’s name or ORCID ID. If there are related DOIs, the search will provide them, and clicking on the DOI will take you to the article itself (which may be behind a paywall).
