Tools for DOIs
What the heck does “DOI: 10.1021/ic00183a004” mean and why should you care? The DOI (or digital object identifier) is a unique character string that identifies a digital object. This object can be an article, a report, a book chapter, an image, a dataset or any other single package of online information. Most commonly you will encounter journal article DOIs in reference lists or endnotes. While the DOI characters don’t generally have a human readable meaning, there are web based tools to link the DOI to the actual full text article.
If you have a DOI and you want to find the object itself (this is also called “resolving the DOI”), the easiest thing to do is to point your browser to http://dx.doi.org/ and copy and paste in the DOI.
After clicking “Go” you will be taken to the publisher’s web page for the article:
Henry C. Kelly, Sritana C. Yasui, and Andrea B. Twiss-Brooks “Hypochlorite chlorination of tertiary amine-boranes,” Inorganic Chemistry 1984 23 (15), 2220-2223
Or, if you have an article citation and need to find the DOI (many journals now request or require a DOI in article manuscript submissions in the list of references) you can use the CrossRef Simple Text Query Form. You must register an email address with CrossRef to use this form.
To use this tool, go to http://www.crossref.org/SimpleTextQuery/ and type (or copy and paste) your reference, enter your registered email address and submit. The tool works best if you have the reference formatted in a standard style (e.g., APA, MLA, etc.). For example, if you copy and paste the same text citation —
Henry C. Kelly, Sritana C. Yasui, and Andrea B. Twiss-Brooks “Hypochlorite chlorination of tertiary amine-boranes,” Inorganic Chemistry 1984 23 (15), 2220-2223
–into the tool, you will retrieve the DOI link for the article:
