Is it worth registering the DOI of an issue?

Content Registration
, , ,
1

Is it worth registering the DOI of an issue? If a periodical is published, are all articles in the issue assigned a DOI?

2

DOIs assigned to the issue do not automatically include all the articles within the issue. Instead, we think of the issue as a separate container or parent for articles. Consequently, there are rarely any citations to the issue of a journal.
You can assign a DOI to an issue, but you also need to assign DOIs to each individual article within that issue. Assigning DOIs to each article is the most important part of meeting publisher obligations with regards to the membership terms.

So, to answer your question - is it worth registering the DOI of an issue? The answer is ‘No’. It is more valuable to spend the time to register each article.

I hope this is helpful. Let me know if you have more questions on this topic.

Warm regards,

Poppy

1 Like
3

Thanks for the quick response.
My rather ridiculous question was prompted by some database suddenly claiming we were doing something wrong by not registering every issue of the magazine.

4

Not ridiculous at all! Its a good question and I think whether it is worth it or not depends on what other systems are importing this data. It may be that some databases rely upon that identifier for some sort of parent/child relationship for the journal, issue, and article. From my own perspective, having used Crossref metadata for bibliometrics or looking at relationships that are asserted between works, I don’t see a value in a DOI assigned to the issue. But, I’m happy to be corrected/informed of other perspectives on this!

-poppy

2 Likes