Wikipedia:Digital Object Identifier Information & Wikipedia:Digital Object Identifier Links at HealthHaven.com

This page documents an English Wikipedia guideline. It is a generally accepted standard that editors should follow, though it should be treated with common sense, and occasional exceptions may apply. When editing this page, please ensure that your revision reflects consensus. When in doubt, discuss your idea on the talk page AKA Discussion page.

Shortcut: WP:DOI

A Digital Object Identifier (DOI) is a unique identifier to a published work, similar in concept to an ISBN. Wikipedia supports the use of DOI to link to published content. Where a journal source has a DOI, it is good practice to use it, in the same way as it is good practice to use ISBN references for book sources.

[edit] How to use DOIs in content

Wikipedia supports automatic linking of DOI references using the template {{doi}} as follows:

{{doi|10.1016/j.iheduc.2008.03.001}}

Which translates to:

doi:10.1016/j.iheduc.2008.03.001

An alternate approach is to use CitationBot to improve the link still further:

{{cite doi|10.1016/j.iheduc.2008.03.001}}

which will be parsed to:

{{cite journal | doi = 10.1016/j.iheduc.2008.03.001 | title = Web 2.0 authorship: Issues of referencing and citation for academic integrity | year = 2008 | author = Gray, K | journal = The Internet and Higher Education | volume = 11 | pages = 112}}

And presented as:

Gray, K (2008). "Web 2.0 authorship: Issues of referencing and citation for academic integrity". The Internet and Higher Education 11: 112. doi:10.1016/j.iheduc.2008.03.001.

[edit] Why use DOI?

This approach avoids a number of common issues with citations in Wikipedia:

Broken links as publishers move or reorganise content.
Copy-paste errors in citation text.
Copyright violation, accidental or deliberate; the DOI citation goes to a source identified as appropriate by the rights owner.
Verifiability enhancements; the DOI will always lead to the correct source, so editorialising of abstracts or even content is avoided.
Preferential treatment. DOI links, like our ISBN book sources, will offer the user a choice of sources where one exists.
Academic users may receive a local full-text source

[edit] See also