Looking up a DOI (was: Re: [referencer] Re: Plugin for fetching data from Isi-WebOfScience)

[Michael Banck]

On Sun, Mar 09, 2008 at 02:15:25PM +0000, John Spray wrote:
> The way the "Get metadata" stuff is structured is such that each plugin
> publishes a list of ID formats that it understands (pubmed, doi, etc),
> and when tyring to get the metadata for a paper referencer tries to
> resolve an ID to the metadata.

I've just imported a couple of papers I had lying around in paper form
into a referencer database.  It is quite cumbersome finding the DOI for
a older paper on which they are not printed, so the process mostly
involved looking up the journal homepage, entering volume/page, looking
for the DOI on the results and entering that into referencer.

I noticed that at least for some journals, it is possible to construct a
URL from volume and page of the paper alone, which is basically the same
URL you get for the paper via dx.doi.org, and which also has the DOI
mentioned somewhere.  Of course, those pages would also have all the
other bibliographical information you'd need (author, title, year,
etc.), but extracting that from the html would probably too cumbersome.

It would be awesome to have some sort of journal database which could
look up DOIs from the JournalName-Volume-Page triple the user could
input via a pop-up GUI similar to the "Add Reference with ID" query.
This database could then get expanded by users based on their scientific
field and most used journals.


Michael