Dear Law Professors,

Perhaps you’ve noticed when you read articles in fields other than the law that the articles have a short string of numbers and letters after the journal citation. Most of these start with the letters “doi.” That is short for digital object identifier. It is a unique label for the article. What it means is that the article with that label can always be found online using that doi. If the article is posted in the author’s workplace institutional repository or on SSRN, the doi can be included in that citation, too, so people who want to cite the work can find the version of record, instead of citing to an early draft they found on SSRN. The total number of views and downloads of that article can be tracked using that one identifier. Just think of it–all your metrics in one place! And when you are researching, looking for an article, clicking on the DOI in a citation will take you straight to the online location of the article. How convenient!

Perhaps you’ve even talked about it when you have co-authored a piece with a scholar from another field–science, medicine, social sciences, the humanities–they all use those DOIs in their journals. Scholars from other fields might think your articles are not quite as scholarly as theirs, since law reviews generally haven’t started using DOIs. Just as law reviews are different from other types of journals because they mostly lack peer review, relying on law student editors, the lack of a DOI makes legal scholarship a little outside the twenty-first century scholarly norm. As we all know, some folks in the legal academy have a teeny bit of a sensitivity to their scholarship being considered less academic and more practice oriented. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, of course. But, if one wants to move in scholarly circles, having DOIs part of your oeuvre helps one to fit in.

As a respected scholar, your interest in the addition of DOIs to your scholarship can help move the legal field towards widespread use of the DOI.

Remember to read my next post in this series on getting your ORCiD!

Sincerely,

Your Scholarly Communications Librarian