DOI (Digital Object Identifier) for Systematic Reviewers and other Researchers: Benefits, Confusions, and Need-to-Knows
I had this question asked so many times I'm fed up with my repetitive patchy answers. Today, I listened to Professor Severus Snape: "Control your emotions! Discipline your mind!" and I wrote this post to refer my students and colleagues to it. Briefly:
PDF, DOI, XML, preprints, and clouds are the most impactful developments in the academic and professional publishing industry during the past 30 years.
What is DOI?
DOI or Digital Object Identifier is a unique number that a publisher, a journal, or a content repository assigns to an online digital object/document. To make it more comparable, it is like ISBN for books and ISSN for journals, DOI could be assigned to a book, book chapter, a video, an image in the paper, a journal, a paper in a journal, an appendix, and so on; however, it has many other good uses and different functions otherwise it would be a duplicate to other IDs. Although DOI was introduced in 2000, the publishers started assigning DOIs to the papers published before 2000 as well!
