Inconsistency in the registration of the Digital Object Identifier (DOI) of articles on Web of Science and Scopus

Abstract

Almost 25 years ago, the Digital Object Identifier (DOI) was implemented with the purpose of providing a unique and persistent form of document identification. As DOIs can be assigned to any object, journals rapidly adopted their use as it eases the process of identifying a specific document, thus increasing its visibility. However, while studying the impact of papers published by Chilean researchers in disciplines related to Social Sciences, Arts, and Humanities, we noticed that some journals published a considerable proportion of documents without DOIs. Thus, we questioned if this was due to a lack of DOI adoption by these journals or if it was a database processing error. Our findings indicate that while most journals have adopted the use of DOI for article-type documents, many of the Web of Science and Scopus records do not include this information. To overcome this issue, databases need to ensure the accuracy and consistency of their data, while the editorial management team of each journal ought to confirm that all the metadata from their articles has been properly registered by these databases. Undoubtedly, the use of DOI benefits all academics as it facilitates the discoverability and retrieval of the published articles.