At the top of newer journal articles (with the citation) you may see a character string that looks like:
This is a Digital Object Identifier (DOI). It is used to uniquely identify an electronic document.
- The DOI for a document is permanent.
- You can simply type a DOI into Google an find a paper. (Whether or not you have access to it depends on if it is Open Access or if you or Colby has paid for it).
- Referring to an online document by its DOI provides more stable linking than a URL, which may change over time.