Introduction for researchers

As a researcher, you know how important it is to reference the works you build upon using proper citations. In your work, maybe you've come across or use DOIs (e.g. 10.1000/182) in the reference section of papers. These digital object identifiers provide unique way to identify an article so there's no confusion between Barely et al. and Barley et al. DOIs are also persistent. If a publisher site changes, you'll still be able to find the article in question. Furthermore, many popular reference managers support DOI lookup so you don't have to enter bibliographic details by hand. You can also easily format your citations in different styles using a service like the DOI Citation Formatter.

Persistent identifiers are key way to make sure the scholarly record is connected and understandable. But why stop at articles? You can now get persistent identifiers (e.g. DOIs) for data sets and software. Making sure your contributions are easy to find and cite.

You can also get your own personal persistent identifier ORCID) to ensure that your contributions are unambiguously identified no matter if you change institutions or roles. (Plus, you don't have to keep reentering your personal information in every new system.) For example, Crossref autoupdate makes sure your ORCID profile is constantly updated with your latest research outputs so you can have consistent trace of your work.

Below you can find more on how to obtain and use persistent identifiers in your scholarship.

External Documentation

You can find a comprehensive slide deck designed to train scientist on best practices for digital scholarship here:

Gil, Yolanda; , (Ed.) (2015): The Geoscience Paper of the Future: OntoSoft Training. figshare.
https://dx.doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.1586773

Slides 40 - 60 focus on persistent identifiers.