Availability of digital object identifiers in publications archived by PubMed

Abstract

Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs)were launched in 1997 to facilitate the long-term access and identification of objects in digital environments. The objective of the present investigation is toassess the DOI availability of articles in biomedical journals indexed in the PubMed database and to complete this investigation with a geographical analysis of journals bythecountry of publisher. Articles were randomly selected from PubMed using their PubMed Identifier (PMID) and were downloaded from and processed through developed Hypertext Preprocessor language (PHP) scripts. The first part of the analysis focuses on the period 1966-2015 (50 years). Of the 496665 articles studied over this period, 201055 have DOIs (40.48%). Results showed that the percentage of articles with DOIs began to increase for articles published in the 2000s, with spectacular growth in the years 2002-2003,then reached a peak in 2015.Data on countries showed that some countries gradually implemented DOIs over theperiod 1966 to 2015 (the United States, the United Kingdom, and the Netherlands), while some did not (Russia, the Czech Republic, and Romania). The second part of the analysis focuses on the year 2015 and includes 268790articles published in 2015,randomly selected to evaluate the current implementation of DOIs. In 2015, 86.42% of articles had DOIs. The geographical analysis of countries of publishers showed that some countries (Russia, Thailand, and Ukraine) still assigned few DOIs to articles in 2015. Thus, if the scientific community aims to increase the number and the usefulness of services rendered by DOIs, efforts must be made to generalize their use by all persons involved in scientific publication, particularly publishers.

The State of OA: A large-scale analysis of the prevalence and impact of Open Access articles

“…Another is that researchers in the scientometrics and OA fields have largely relied on other indexes, particularly Scopus and Web of Science (WoS), to represent the literature as a whole; this makes our results more difficult to compare to previous work. Finally DOIs are known to be less frequently assigned by publishers in certain disciplines (like humanities; Gorraiz 2016), in certain geographic regions (particularly the developing world), and among older articles (Boudry, 2017); consequently, these segments will be underrepresented in our sample. This said, Scopus and WoS are also known to underrepresent important segments of the literature, and so this failing is not limited to Crossref.…”

International authorship and collaboration across bioRxiv preprints

“…However, only 31% of papers published in China had DOIs, and just 2% (33 out of 1582) of papers published in Russia. Boudry and Chartron (2017) included the 50 most productive countries in their analysis; of these, we found no relationship between a country’s preprint publication rate and the rate at which publishers in that country assigned DOIs (Pearson’s r=0.168, p=0.245).…”

“…Each published bioRxiv preprint is listed with the DOI of its published version, but DOI assignment is not yet universally adopted. Boudry and Chartron (2017) examined papers from 2015 indexed by PubMed and found DOI assignment varied widely based on the country of the publisher. 96% of publications in Germany had a DOI, for example, plus 98% of U.K. publications and more than 99% of Brazilian publications.…”

The State of Oa: A Large-Scale Analysis of the Prevalence and Impact of Open Access Articles

“…Другая заключается в том, что исследователи в области наукометрии и ОД в основном полагаются на иные источники, особенно на Scopus и Web of Science (WoS) для оценки потока литературы в целом, поэтому наши результаты трудно сравнивать с результатами прежних исследований. Наконец, известно, что DOI реже присваиваются публикациям в некоторых дисциплинах, в частности в гуманитарных науках [42], в некоторых регионах, в особенности в развивающихся странах, и для более старых работ [43]; следовательно, эти сегменты хуже представлены в нашей выборке. Однако известно, что Scopus и Web of Science также недостаточно учитывают важные сегменты литературы [44], так что этот недостаток свойствен не только Crossef.…”