DOI stands for Digital Object Identifier. It's essentially a link with a lot of numbers in that always connects to a single document.
For example, the article "Ethics in Community Nursing" by Pope, Hough, and Chase has a DOI of 10.18785/ojhe.1202.03.
You can search for that article in any database, search for it in Google or Google Scholar, and it will always be attached to the number 10.18785/ojhe.1202.03.
You can also do the reverse! If you only have the DOI of an object, you can search for 10.18785/ojhe.1202.03 in Google, Google Scholar, or any library resources and it will always return "Ethics in Community Nursing."
We use DOIs for a few things. Essentially, we use the DOI to refer back to a single article. In context that could like like a few scenarios:
1) When we cite articles, we're often asked to include the DOI. In APA, the style guide used in Nursing research, you would need to include the DOI at the end of the citation, like this:
Pope, B., Hough, M. C., & Chase, S. (2016). Ethics in community nursing. Online Journal of Health Ethics, 12(2) doi:10.18785/ojhe.1202.03
The reason some style guides include this is to make it very easy to follow up on an article's references. So if you see a piece of information in the article you're reading, you can check out the citation for it in the References List, copy and paste the DOI of the citation you're interested in, and find that new article yourself!
2) The other reason we use DOIs is so that when we're communicating with our fellow researchers, our peers, or our professors, we can give them to DOI so that they use that number to look for the article you're referring to. If you need to collaborate on a project, or if your professor is asking to see your sources, you can give them the DOI and know with confidence that they'll be able to get to the resource you're looking at.
Many databases will have the DOI readily available, either included with the article's publication information or in the database-provided citation tool.
If you can't find the database's citation tool or if it doesn't provide the DOI for you, follow these steps to find the article's DOI:
The easiest way to find an article's DOI is by searching for the article's title or full citation in Bell Library's Quick Search.
Get to the Quick Search from the Library's Homepage here:
Copy and paste the article's title or citation into the Quick Search Box and hit "Search."
If your article doesn't come up, it's possible that's because we don't have access to the article. If that's the case, click the check box in the upper right hand corner of the screen that says "Add Results From Other Libraries."
When your article appears, click the button that looks like quotations marks like this: "
If you need the article's full citation, click the drop down arrow and select the citation style you need. If all you need to find is the DOI, select "APA" in that drop down menu and the DOI will be provided at the end of the citation.
