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

[Michael Banck]

On Tue, Jul 08, 2008 at 03:14:42PM +0200, Michael Banck wrote:
> While this would be certainly welcome, I think initially it would be
> less work to just extract the DOI from the article's HTML page, and do a
> metadata search on it using the available plugins (crossref/pubmed/
> arxiv).
> 
> This reduces the problem to constructing the unique URL of the article,
> and extracting the DOI from the HTML page, something users without any
> python or XML-parsing knowledge could do for their journals.
> 
> Constructing a unique URL is not always possible (e.g. Science Direct
> seems to use md5sum hashes for each article as URL), but seems to work
> for a lot of cases.  For example, for the American Institue of Physics
> (AIP) journals, the URL is as follows:

I did some research now, and unfortunately it seems that most other
organizations encode the issue number into the URL as well.  While the
year, volume and page are readily available from usual citations in
other articles or by looking at the paper article itself, the issue
number is usually ommitted.  By the time you found out the issue number,
you can just as well research the DOI itself and type that I guess :-/

I checked the following, and they all seem to need the issue number:

Science
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/321/5885/97

American Chemical Society
http://pubs.acs.org/cgi-bin/abstract.cgi/jacsat/2008/130/i27/abs/ja8018912.html

American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology
http://www.jbc.org/cgi/content/abstract/283/28/19351
http://www.mcponline.org/cgi/content/abstract/7/7/1397

Proceedings of the National Acedemy of Science
http://hwmaint.pnas.org/cgi/content/abstract/105/26/9011

Nature and Wiley both use the DOI and not the page number in their URLs.

This basically leaves AIP and APS journals, the latter has alternative
short URls without issue numbers:
http://link.aps.org/abstract/PRL/v30/p368

Maybe it looks better for other fields like Math, Biology or
Biochemistry (I mostly checked Physical Chemistry and related)

Also note that the Web-of-Sience plugin is probably able to resolve the
DOI/full bibliographic information if the user has access to WOS and is
fed with Journal/Volume/Page appropriately.  Right now it is of limited
use as you already need to have the data available.

Another possible GUI for this would be to check whether a reference's
properties has at least the journal name, the volume and the page filled
in, and then allow the user to hit "Lookup Metadata", at which point the
appropriate plugins (let's say AIP/APS, and WOS if available (maybe
Pubmed can do more advanced searches than just DOI, have not checked))
would get passed the information, and retrieve the DOI and possibly
other information.

In any case, once you have the DOI/issue number, fulltext acces is
possbile for some of the above (PNAS, Nature, APS/AIP, ASBMB).


Michael