8

I want to cite a book in my bibliography which does not seem to have a DOI listed anywhere. Google also does not give me a DOI for the whole book. However, it does provide me with DOIs for each chapter.

How can I handle this if I want my bibliography to have a clickable link for the book? I have sometimes seen the first chapter DOI used, while the entire book is named as the reference.

Improve this question
7
  • 1
    @toby544 Yes, there is, but the issue with that is that it is not necessarily persistent. With a DOI that would be (or at least should) be the case.
    – HerpDerpington
    Commented Aug 15 at 18:27
  • 3
    @HerpDerpington The reason to look at the publisher website is not to link to it, but to see how they list the publication data. But really, the most reliable source of a books publication data is in the first few pages of the book. Please note that citation convictions predate the computer.
    – Terry Loring
    Commented Aug 15 at 18:32
  • 1
    @HerpDerpington You could always make the website persistent by saving it in the Wayback Machine.
    – user128581
    Commented Aug 15 at 21:12
  • 1
    Do you have to cite the whole book, or would citing a single chapter be enough?
    – Neinstein
    Commented Aug 16 at 8:36
  • 1
    Contact the publisher, explain your point of view. You might be on to something!
    – A rural reader
    Commented Aug 18 at 23:04

3 Answers 3

Reset to default
21

Note: This answer provides information related to citations in general, but the OP needs help with clickable citations.

I consider the DOI optional. If you have publisher, date of publication, author and title, that can be enough. All of this should be in the first few pages of the book.

If a journal editor insists on a DOI, URL, city of publication and other fluff, then the journal can go looking for that.

Improve this answer
6
  • I agree, except that you might as well include city of publication as that is usually written there as well. And of course you need the edition number if it is not the 1st.
    – toby544
    Commented Aug 16 at 8:20
  • 6
    Don't they often "delegate" this responsibility to authors though? As in, "please fix ref. [42] to correspond to the required format" during the copywrighting process.
    – Neinstein
    Commented Aug 16 at 8:35
  • 4
    @Neinstein Some do. Some don't. In any case, adding a DOI that does not exist is not fixing anything.
    – Terry Loring
    Commented Aug 16 at 14:32
  • 1
    I realize now I misread the question. The OP wants a clickable citation, not the journal. So stop voting this one up.
    – Terry Loring
    Commented Aug 16 at 14:46
  • @nein I’ve never seen that.
    – Azor Ahai -him-
    Commented Aug 18 at 13:01
19

Honestly, I think that a lot of the questions here about citation formats are mountains being made out of molehills, including (perhaps) this one. Remember why we provide citations:

  1. It is to help us remember where we found our ideas in the first place. I cannot tell you how many times I have had to look at my own bibliographies in order to remember where something came from, and how it worked. Having a good citation makes it possible to relearn something I knew once upon a time.
  2. It is to make it possible for future scholars to "check our work" and reproduce our results—in order to do this, they need to know how we came to the conclusions we came to, which includes knowing where our ideas came from. A citation tells that future scholar where to find the documents we used.
  3. It is to give credit to the researchers who came before us. Consider this part of the "gamification" of academia (since, for example, a tenure decision might be made on the basis of citation counts; also, it is just good etiquette to give credit where credit is due).

In all of the above cases, a citation which makes it possible to find the original source is all that is required. Generally speaking, author, title, and year is going to be enough. Maybe throw in a journal and/or publisher to make the Googling go faster. You don't need a DOI, and many older documents don't even have a DOI to reference. Sure, a DOI makes it faster and easier to find a document, but as long as there is sufficient information, it is fine to leave some fields blank.

That being said, if you are submitting a paper for publication, the journal will have standards for citations. Luckily, journals employ editors, whose job it is (in part) to ensure that these standards are met. If you submitting something, and you think that your citations might be insufficient, that is a conversation to be had between you and an editor. For all other cases, just make sure that you keep enough information to find the document again (e.g. author, title, year; DOI; a persistent link of some kind; etc), and don't sweat it.

Improve this answer
13
  • 1
    I'm also bothered you the workflow. This is a copy editors job, and can pretty much go unanswered until the appropriate stage of the paper, which is galleys, and will p9ssibly be resolved all on it's own without ant input from the author.
    – Scott Seidman
    Commented Aug 15 at 21:18
  • 2
    In my US high school, which was probably typical, my teachers made a very big deal of citation formats. Even the smallest mistake brought out the red pen, with points taken off. In retrospect, this was probably because teachers don't have enough time to genuinely evaluate writing quality for 150 student papers.
    – academic
    Commented Aug 15 at 21:25
  • 2
    @ScottSeidman And, in my experience, the resolution might well be "We don't include DOIs or links for books".
    – Anyon
    Commented Aug 15 at 22:10
  • 1
    @XanderHenderson: If you don't tell high school students the exact citation format, you will get citations of the form "(the textbook)" or "(the internet)." And then when you take off points, they'll ask which part of the rubric they broke (because they think that they can just put "(whatever)" in parentheses and call it a citation).
    – Kevin
    Commented Aug 16 at 3:57
  • 6
    @Kevin I would tell high school students exactly what I said here, reinforce that they need to keep track of the author and title at minimum, show them MLA and APA and Chicago and a few others, then introduce them to something like Endnote. The rubric is "Could I easily find the source you cited?" But, honestly, my complaint is more about high school teachers (and a few of my community college colleagues) who can't articulate the reasons to provide customs, and obsess about a specific format. It feels cargo culty.
    – Xander Henderson
    Commented Aug 16 at 4:46
5

Usually, books do have a DOI, from which their chapter DOIs are derived.

Take Springer. Compiler Specification and Verification (LNCS 124) has the following chapters:

  • Introduction (doi:10.1007/3-540-10886-6_1)
  • Theoretical framework (doi:10.1007/3-540-10886-6_2)
  • Source and target languages (doi:10.1007/3-540-10886-6_3)
  • The compiler proof (doi:10.1007/3-540-10886-6_4)
  • Conclusions (doi:10.1007/3-540-10886-6_5)

We can guess that the overall book DOI is doi:10.1007/3-540-10886-6 – and we'd be right.

ACM:

  • OOPSLA '87 Delegation is inheritance (doi:10.1145/38765.38820)
  • OOPSLA '87 Object-oriented programming in Smalltalk and ADA (doi:10.1145/38765.38826)

Guess: doi:10.1145/38765.

AMS:

  • Sur les décompositions cellulaires des espaces (doi:10.1090/pspum/056.1/1278698)
  • Real algebraic quotients (doi:10.1090/pspum/056.1/1278707)

Guess: doi:10.1090/pspum/056.1.

Elsevier, as usual, is a huge pain. From these chapters, a pattern is obvious:

  • Anterior Cruciate Ligament Ruptures in the Female Athlete: An Injury Epidemic (doi:10.1016/B978-0-323-54839-7.00001-4)
  • Epidemiology (doi:10.1016/B978-0-323-54839-7.00002-6)

The letter B, the ISBN, a 5-digit chapter number, and then a check-digit.

But doi:10.1016/B978-0-323-54839-7 is not a valid DOI! The correct DOI for this book is doi:10.1016/C2016-0-05049-0. I cannot work out why.

Improve this answer
4
  • You are right! I forgot to provide the actual DOI. It was Elsevier. I tried the same thing and could not figure out the DOI. Maybe I can contact their support and ask if it even has one? Because the book DOI is not listed anywhere.
    – HerpDerpington
    Commented Aug 18 at 18:12
  • @HerpDerpington I might be able to find it. Which book is it?
    – wizzwizz4
    Commented Aug 18 at 19:08
  • This is the doi link for chapter 1: doi.org/10.1016/B978-0-08-030275-1.50007-2
    – HerpDerpington
    Commented Aug 18 at 21:03
  • 2
    @HerpDerpington I checked Crosslink, but could only find ISBNs for two book reviews (1, 2). I also tried all the tricks I know for the Elsevier website, and I couldn't figure out an ISBN-A (apparently a thing, per this answer, though I've never seen an ISBN-A in the wild). I don't think there is a DOI for this book, making my answer wrong.
    – wizzwizz4
    Commented Aug 18 at 21:23

You must log in to answer this question.

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged .