The Digital Object Identifier or DOI is the heart of an identification mechanism for digital resources, such as journals, scientific articles, reports, videos, etc. It is sometimes compared to ISSN or ISBN for the web, but it is also an alternative to URL instability by associating the location of the document and the metadata linked to it. Now with the DOI resolver you can have the best deals now.

The DOI or Digital Object Identifier ​​is a standardized method for the permanent identification of a published electronic object, a kind of permanent code for scientific articles. The allocation and management of DOIs is the responsibility of international external agencies, a link using a DOI is, therefore, the most stable link there is: even if a journal changes publisher and therefore website, its DOI will remain the same. The DOI being short and stable, it responds to the problems of transmission of dead links or too long links. For these reasons, more and more styles of bibliographic presentation now ask to put not the URL of an article in the reference, but rather to indicate the DOI. The presentation of the reference is thus refined no longer long URLs with bizarre characters and we are sure that the link will always be good.

An article published on the website of a journal often under the term Online First, Articles in Press, Early View, and Advanced Publication and other variants will also keep the even DOI when it is eventually integrated into a specific issue of a journal, thus making monitoring easier.

DOI for article

The DOI of an article usually appears in the article or in the databases and websites of journal publishers, along with other bibliographic information. It always starts with the number ten followed by a period and a combination of numbers, letters and a few special characters. For example, the DOI of the article Bone mineral density of competitive male mountain and road cyclists from the journal Bone is 10.1016 or S8756-3282 (01) 00704-9.

If someone sends you the DOI of an article, to go to the electronic version of this article, simply type in your browser the address followed by the DOI. You will be automatically directed to the article on its publisher’s web page. Please note: if the journal is only accessible by subscription, you will have access to the abstract of the article, but not to the article itself. To see if the INRS has access to the article you want, use the Get an article form instead and fill in only the DOI field.

Metadata saved for a DOI

A unique DOI is assigned to each resource and will not be reused. It is established by recording metadata related to digital resource.

Consequently, the DOI link the metadata of the journal, the book, that of the document article, chapter, etc. and the web location of the resource. They make it possible to facilitate the operation of databases as well as bibliographic management software, but also to follow a resource in the digital world.

The corollary of this system is the generation of a permanent code even if the resource is moved. It is important to guarantee the sustainability of the resource to integrate these databases and therefore to avoid duplicates and deletions of documents. Like URLs, DOIs are structured codes that start with the code of the organization responsible for distributing the resource, then the document identifier.