DOI for Proceedings

Content Registration
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Hi everyone!

There is a discussion going on on the CSE-email/discussion-list and more than one person asked my position/opinion about it, so thought it would be better to post it here to hear from the experts :slight_smile:

Jessica McEwan posted this:

I’d like to ask for your thoughts on individual vs group DOI for published abstract proceedings.
*Our Journals assign a DOI for each abstract we publish from society meetings. For our newer online-only annual Journal, we realized that the publication of meeting proceedings had been delayed until later in the year because our publisher’s workflow doesn’t allow issues in progress to have fractional pages (multiple items assigned a doi on a single page). This lead me to investigate whether DOIs should be assigned to these items and the pros and cons of individual DOI vs a DOI for the entire abstract document. Abstracts aren’t indexed – so maybe this is extra unnecessary work? But, maybe it is even more important since abstracts are not indexed……. *
The benefits of individual DOI assignment:
All of the benefits of DOI
Formatting enhancements - each individual abstract listed on the table of contents with authors
The cons:
Delayed publication due to fractional page issue
Potential for individual item with a doi to be counted as source item by clarivate

This part really got me: Abstracts aren’t indexed – so maybe this is extra unnecessary work? But, maybe it is even more important since abstracts are not indexed

Then, Mary Billingsley added this to the discussion:

Our annual proceedings issue just published yesterday, and we have individual DOIs for each abstract – including multiple items assigned a DOI on a single page. We assign DOIs to each abstract as a benefit to meeting presenters and to encourage users to properly cite meeting content. We sometimes also have multiple DOIs on a single page in regular journal issues with letters to the editor and book reviews. I’ve never heard of the fractional page problem

Soo… anyone has any comments on this? :slight_smile:

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Hi Bruna,

Fundamentally, DOIs are citation identifiers. So, a good question to consider when evaluating the utility of a DOI in a situation like this is, “will this item be cited?”.

I can’t say for sure that it never happens, but it’s pretty unlikely for someone to cite an entire conference proceedings as a whole. If they’re going to cite something, it will be an individual abstract or an individual conference papers. (similarly, it would be fairly rare to see a whole journal issue cited, as opposed to an individual journal article)

So, we’d recommend registering a DOI for each abstract. There’s just not much utility in registering only the proceedings as a whole.

Best,
Shayn

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Thank you, Shayn! Very clear answer…!