User:Forbes72/doi

Why good citations are important

For a general background about academic citations, see: Wikipedia:Scientific citation guidelines. This provides a good goal to work toward. In practice, many citations fall short of the standard. Some examples: while it is a common practice in print journals to use the ISO-4 abbreviations in citations, this can be confusing to a general audience, and is discouraged on Wikipedia. If a publisher hosts a journal article, it is generally better to link to it through a digital object identifier rather than a simple url, because the identifier has more resistance to link rot. Sometimes articles are cited without a title, requiring them to be located by volume and page. This can lead to a lot of confusion, such as when I found a non-English journal was cited using a translated journal name that happened to coincide with the name of an unrelated English language journal. The goal of the citation is to make verifiability as easy as possible.

Pros and cons of doi

Where it exists, the most generally useful identifier to include in a citation is the digital object identifier. This has a bunch of advantages, being machine-readable, unambiguous, unique, and providing some access to the source itself. There are two main issues with the doi though. First, that not every article has a doi. While the vast majority of English-language peer reviewed articles published today have a doi for every article, the coverage becomes much more spotty for both foreign language and older articles. So the doi does not always exist. Second, the doi may link to a paywalled resource, when free alternatives are available. For newer articles, arXiv often provides free access, while for articles with expired copyright, repositories such the Internet Archive or HathiTrust are often useful. So for paywalled articles, it is good to check if the article is freely available somewhere. However, this not an immediate concern, as simply adding the doi can make it easier for a bot to come through and add a link to a free resource later.

Citer and semi-automated references

Filling out a {{cite journal}} template can be done by hand, but it is time-consuming and prone to error. If a doi exists, the citer tool usually makes citing sources significantly easier. Simply putting in a doi usually gives a usable full citation which can be copy-pasted into the body of a Wikipedia article. However, the system has some quirks that mean it is usually advisable to check the output before copying it blindly:

• Articles published by American Physical Society are often missing page numbers.
• Articles published by the Royal Society of London are sometimes missing authors.
• Citations are sometimes listed in all capital letters.
• Non-roman characters like ä,ö,ü often end up garbled and have to be manually retyped.
• Journal citations are generally more reliable than conference citations or book citations, which very often have incorrect or missing information.

Despite the issues, this is usually the fastest way to get a full citation. To improve usability, I'd also suggest After adding tags |doi-access=free for open-access journals, and setting |display-authors=5 for articles with a long author list.