In our citation services, we provide the DOI value for each citation. But what is DOI and why is it useful?
DOI, short for Digital Object Identifier, is like driver’s license number for scientific publications: it is a persistent identifier used to identify academic, professional, and government information uniquely, standardized by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO).
As an example, the paper titled “A quantitative comparison of NIRS and fMRI across multiple cognitive tasks” has an DOI 10.1016/j.neuroimage.2010.10.069 You will find all DOIs start with 10.
Why is DOI useful?
- If you build and maintain your own citation database, you may use DOI as the identifier. In the field of biology and medicine, PubMed ID is also a useful identifier. However, only papers indexed by PubMed has a PubMed ID. DOI is adopted in all fields.
- You can quickly find the link of a paper if you know its DOI. Just add DOI after https://dx.doi.org/. Take the above paper as an example, its link is: https://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.neuroimage.2010.10.069 After you click the link, it will automatically redirect you to the paper’s official site.
- If you enter an DOI in Google, Bing, Goolge Scholar or any other search engines, you can find the paper quickly too.
- If you need to send a list of papers to your customers or colleagues, having DOI values will help them find the paper more quickly.