Digital object identifier and its use in core Chinese academic journals: A Chinese perspective

Digital object identifiers (DOIs) are widely used across the world but not very much within China. This paper investigates the current usage of DOIs in China. Using an isometric method, we sampled 238 core Chinese academic journals from the Chinese Science and Technical Journal Citation Reports (2015 version, Core Edition), which includes 2,383 journals in total. According to our investigation, we found that: (1) although 80.25% of journals assign DOIs, 42.41% have only assigned DOIs to articles published after 2010; (2) most journals (89.01%) register DOIs through Institute of Scientific and Technical Information of China; and (3) only 84.82% of journals that register DOIs include them in the articles. This paper looks at the reasons for the limited implementation of DOIs and makes suggestions as to how usage can be expanded in China.