Excursus » DOI

Simple Text Query for DOI Numbers

Mark Eli Kalderon — Thu, 20 Mar 2008 14:39:46 +0000

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.

Eating My Own Dog Food

Mark Eli Kalderon — Thu, 01 Nov 2007 02:39:30 +0000

After my post about DOI numbers, I realized, to my chagrin, that the online version of the journal that I edit, has no explicit representation of DOI numbers. They occur as part of the URL query string, but in order to extract this information, you have to:

Know what a URL query string is
Know the syntax of DOI numbers

It would be better if this were explicitly represented. (At least you can downlaod citations in BibTeX.) I will be contacting Blackwells about this.

LaTeX and DOI numbers

Mark Eli Kalderon — Sun, 28 Oct 2007 00:06:40 +0000

Most academic journals in my field publish online as well as print. Increasingly, it is more convenient for me to download an article than to go to the library (especially since my University library has the appalling policy of allowing people to check out journals—which means that there is good chance that what you are looking for won’t be there.) Given the prevalence of articles appearing online, it is useful for your readers to include a link to the relevant url in your bibliography. That way, when reading your pdf, they can click on a link in your bibliography and their default browser automagically launches and takes them to the referenced paper. Too cool.

There are however, problems. Here are two. First, many urls contain “%” characters which will cause LaTeX to choke since it interpret these as a comment character. You could, of course, edit the .bbl file adding escape characters, but a programmatic solution would be better. But any such solution would not be sustainable. Websites move. A url that now works may not work in the future and there is no gurantee that the old url will redirect.

Fortunately, there is a solution to this latter problem—DOI numbers. DOIs or Document Object Identifies provides a framework for the persistent identification of objects online. The DOI system has recently been accepted for standardization by the ISO. Not only are DOIs persistent and so will track the relevant document through changes in urls, but the DOI syntax does not involve any characters that will cause LaTeX to choke. Problem solved. Almost.

Some BibTeX styles, such as natbib supports DOI fields. However, even with loading the hyperref and and url packages, no clickable link is generated. Once you have a DOI number, to make a link, you need to prepend the url of a DOI proxy server, such as http://dx.doi.org/. Place the resulting url:

http://dx.doi.org/DOInumber

in the URL field to yield a stable persistent link to the cited paper.