Persistent Identifiers for scholarly outputs
Altmetrics tracking and gathering is reliant on scholarly outputs having a permanent identifier or a digital home. The constant increase and availability of digital information, means that it is essential for academics to ensure that their research can be easily identified and correctly attributed to them.
Just as there are author identifiers such as an ORCID iD to help reduce ambiguity issues with similar author names or name variations amongst scholarly authors, actual research objects also require identification. Persistent unique identifiers for scholarly outputs vary across disciplines but are one way to ensure that researchers can claim their work and also better track the engagement with their research.
Depending on the research output and what service is doing the tracking, these identifiers can include:
- PMID - article identifier in PubMed database, associated with health/medical research
- arXiv ID - preprint identifier, associated with Physics, Mathematics & Computer Sciences
- ADS ID – Astrophysics datasystem
- SSRN ID – Social Sciences Outputs
- RePEC ID – economics research
- Handle net identifiers – often used in institutional repositories
- URN (Uniform Resource Name) Identifiers
- Clinical Trials.gov records Medicine/Biomedicine
- ISBNS – books hosted on publisher domains and google books
- DOIs – (Digital Object Identifier) assigned to individual journal articles at the point of publication and by platforms such as figshare to other outputs (including datasets and images)
DOIs - Digital Object Identifiers
Online Journal article DOI
Bridges and DOIs
Bridges is Monash University's repository for research data, collections, and research activity outputs. Bridges is also the home of the University's online archive of PhD and Masters by Research theses. By electing to use the repository, researchers can increase the discoverability of, and engagement with their research, as well as comply with publisher and funder requirements, and receive a permanent link to their research online (a DOI).
This repository is an important part of tracking, particularly for disciplines that are not represented well by journal publishing. It allows researchers to upload diverse research ouputs< including surveys, data, video and audio. If able to be made public, the ouputs will also receive a DataCite DOI which means they are citable and engagement elsewhere can be tracked, leading to greater visibility of the research.
Example of a PowerPoint presentation deposited in Bridges with assigned DOI
