What is a DOI?
Many scholarly book and journal publishers assign Digital Object Identifiers, or DOIs, to their articles. These are a unique number, usually starting with 10.
They can be used as a unique identifier for that specific article, and to generate a URL that will work in perpetuity to forward to the authoritative version of that article, following the standard URL pattern:
https://dx.doi.org/10.xxxxx
Using DOIs?
Many scholarly book and journal publishers assign Digital Object Identifiers, or DOIs, to their articles. These can be used to generate a URL that works in permalinks.
Advantages of using a DOI
The DOI this the most stable URL in scholarly publishing. Publishers commit to maintaining DOI's in perpetuity, even if they experience corporate mergers and name changes.
For this reason, the DOI is recommended in many citation styles and editorial guidelines. It is a generic URL that will work for anyone in the world.
did you know? If you publish or upload any material to Northeastern's Digital Repository Service, we issue a DOI for it. This includes student theses and dissertations, data sets, posters and presentations, photographs, and other records.
Disadvantages of using a DOI
Because the DOI is not customized for Northeastern's login environment, users who are not on Northeastern network at one of our campuses may not be able to access them. The publisher's website will often not have a mechanism for recognizing and authenticating them.
Even the Northeastern VPN is not able to proxy or authenticate users for publisher websites.
Customizing a DOI for Northeastern users:
Adding Northeastern's login prefix, example below, ensures that students and colleagues are prompted to log in with their Northeastern account, as long as the library subscribes to the journal:
Sample DOI:
10.1126/science.343.6166.14
Corrresponding URL link
https://dx.doi.org/10.1353/caj.2017.0014
Corresponding URL link, customized for Northeastern login access
http://ezproxy.neu.edu/login?url=http://dx.doi.org/10.1126/science.343.6166.14
Make sure that you're able to access the full text of an article through the publisher's website before assigning it as a course reading. You can check our e-journal subscriptions here: http://library.northeastern.edu/ejournals.
Does Northeastern have this article? Searching a DOI
- Enter the DOI of the item you want into Scholar OneSearch to find out if Northeastern offers subscription or licensed access.
- View online, or click the "Link" to get a link for sharing within Northeastern
- Copy the link to paste into emails or share with students
