What Is a DOI (Digital Object Identifier)?

As you know, digitization is penetrating the whole world due to the internet’s rapidly widespread and unavoidable nature. It doesn’t matter in which industry you are in(DOI is one of them); whether you want it or not, you will have to accept the influence and importance of computers and specifically the internet in your work/business/enterprise/organization/product.

Concerning the aforementioned initialization, it would not be early to point out the area of interest here: “research paper publication” to open access journals, which is far from digitizing. As a result, DOI is some arrangement/mechanism that makes the task simpler and easy to access the research document from the deep sea of the “World Wide Web (WWW)”.

You can also put it like this, DOI will bring the research fraternity even closer around the globe. If you ask me, “is it compulsory for each and every digital document to have DOI?” My answer would be no. The reason for saying this is that, as of now, DOI is not mandatory, but it is much better. Attaching DOI with the research documents will boost your citation count and contribute more to the betterment of humanity. It is a win-win situation.

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To summarize, it would be good to write here: “DOI resolves the problem of finding research documents online at the fingertips”.

So what is DOI?

It is a non-repetitive, and constant group of characters, numbers, symbols, special characters and words, linked with online journals, articles, books and many more intellectual digital works for a perpetual time period.

It works as a permanent web address just as a URL for research papers/articles/books, like any other website URL. By clicking on it, an authorized person can access the e-resources online very quickly, without thinking about other complexity.

What does DOI look like?

It is just like some type of hyperlinks, for example:

• doi:10.1080/8585748585.2022.1770549
• https://doi.org/10.0011/hex.12445
• https://dx.doi.org/10.1080/02022667.2019.15662625
• https://doi.org/11.1026/j.jpsychires.2018.11.015

Which types of digital documents can have DOI?

DOI can be attached to;

https://tijer.org/index.php/tijer/index

• academic journal articles 
• research reports 
• governmental reports
• data sets
• books
• conference proceedings
• code
• media 

Why is DOI needed for research articles?

It is a unique dangling identifier for online research articles/books/papers, or documents. It is used for permanently citing the documents in the ocean of www.

You may say research articles can be accessed via the publisher-provided link, but what happens if the publisher’s website may lose its domain or may find some technical problems in hosting?

In the above-discussed situation, the document cannot be accessed via the link provided by the publisher. In such a scenario, DOI is the only solution for accessing the document on the World Wide Web. DOIs make it easier to retrieve your digital document.

We can say that DOI is more stable than normal web links.

How to find DOI in an online research paper?

Generally, you can have a DOI link underneath the research paper title, but this position is not fixed for each and every journal. Sometimes you can also find the DOI in the footer as well. It is totally dependent upon the journal management authorities where they want to place it. The only concern is that it must be easily visible to any visitor.

What if you do not find DOI in a research article?

Insert relevant information like article title/author into the metadata field on https://www.crossref.org/

How to get a DOI?

International DOI Foundation is responsible for managing the body of the DOI. Several DOI agencies have affiliation and homologation with the International DOI Foundation, the end touch point for the DOI creation. To get the DOI, you must find the service providers, such as OJSCloud (www.ojscloud.com), India’s leading DOI provider. They are the official sponsored partner of crossref (one of the registration agencies for the International DOI Foundation). It assigns DOIs to scholarly research publications.