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Friday 31 August 2018

Getting a DOI Number

I have posted on how to get a DOI before (here), but due to lots of questions, have decided to repeat the performance!

As many of you know, all electronically sourced journal articles also need to be referenced in our bibliographies with a DOI number, or a document object identifier. The idea behind moving to a DOI is that this is a permalink to ONE central repository, which can be accessed through whatever database is being deployed where we are searching. Using a DOI makes sense, and you can read more about it here, and here.

If we get a hardcopy journal article, no DOI is needed. However, if we get an electronic copy of a article, we should get a DOI. The tricky thing is getting hold of a DOI when our library may not necessarily provide us with one (such as when we have interloaned an article), or if we find an article somewhere online, on Academia.edu, or on ResearchGate (where we probably won't be supplied anything other than what is on the 'page'). Also, GoogleScholar doesn't yet list DOI numbers, so there is no help there.

There is a relatively easy solution, though it can take quite a bit of hunting to find it. All we need to do is to go to https://doi.crossref.org/simpleTextQuery each time we want to look up a journal reference. We copy our APA reference and paste it into the “Enter text in the box below:” field, tick the “List all possible DOIs per reference” box, and then click the “Submit” button.

It may take up to a minute to get a result, where the DOI will show on a line below our APA reference. Copy the DOI, and paste it out into whatever we use to manage our references (e.g., Word Referencing, Mendeley, Zotero, or your spreadsheet).

Once we have our result, if we want to look up more DOIs, we simply click the “Reset” button. This will take us back to the first window.

This makes life very easy. Thanks, CrossRef!!


Sam

2 comments :

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