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Tuesday, January 15, 2008

Digital Object Identifier (DOI)

 
The digital object identifier, or DOI, is a unique identifier that's given to electronic documents. The idea is that it serves as a permalink to the item. An item can be moved to a different webpage but the DOI will always point to it as long as the DOI is undated when the item is moved.

We often encounter these DOI identifiers in online journal articles. For example, a recently published PNAS article has the following DOI 10.1073/pnas.0709013104. I usually forget how to resolve those DOI's. In case I'm not the only one, I thought I'd post the information.

The resolver is locatad at http://dx.doi.org/. So if you want to see the PNAS article you type in the following URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1073/pnas.0709013104. Try it.


4 comments :

Argent23 said...

Or, if you are using Firefox, just type doi:// followed by the DOI you want to view. I don't know how Firefox resolves the DOI internally, but it works.

Rustybutt said...

Here's some info I found about the Firefox doi/hdr handler addon.

Rosie Redfield said...

Thanks! I always wondered what I was supposed to do with those DIO numbers.

Anonymous said...

This was very helpful. Thanks