Excursus

DOI numbers are increasingly important for academic bibliographies as more and more research is made available online. It is much easier to download a journal article from your office than to walk to the library only to find that the volume has been checked out. (Yes, many research libraries allow journal volumes to be checked out, crazy as that may seem.) DOI numbers allow you to reliably access that material—URLs may change but DOIs are forever. However, access to DOI numbers is not always transparently displayed by publishers. (I eat my own dog food—mmm, dog food—Aristotelian Society publications now display DOI numbers discretely in a footer along with other pertinent bibliographic data.) So, you want to Do the Right Thing™ and include the DOI number in your bibliography but can’t easily find it? Crossref can help. Simple Text Query is an online form that returns a DOI number from a bibliographic reference:

This form allows you to retrieve Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs) for journal articles, books, and chapters by simply cutting and pasting the reference list into the box below. You may use the form with any reference style, although the tool works most reliably if references are formatted in a standard style such as shown in this example:

Clow GD, McKay CP, Simmons Jr. GM, and Wharton RA, Jr. 1988. Climatological observations and predicted sublimation rates at Lake Hoare, Antarctica. Journal of Climate 1:715-728.

To test the interface, simply cut & paste this reference!

Please separate individual references by a blank line. For best results, there should be no line breaks within an individual reference. When submitting multiple references they must be in alphabetical order or presented as a numbered list. For editorial purposes, to check the accuracy of a reference click on the DOI link that is returned with the reference.