A DOI is the permanent identifier printed on nearly every journal article published since the late 1990s. Because it is registered along with the article's metadata, a DOI is the fastest way to build an accurate reference — there is no need to retype the author list, the volume number or the page range by hand.
Paste the DOI and this tool retrieves the record from Crossref, the registry that holds metadata for over 140 million works, then formats it in the style you choose. Every field remains editable, and nothing is invented: if the registry has no value for a field, the field is left blank and flagged.
A DOI (Digital Object Identifier) is a permanent address for a piece of research. It always begins with "10." followed by a registrant code, a slash, and a suffix chosen by the publisher — for example 10.1038/nature12373. Unlike a normal web link, a DOI keeps working when a journal changes platform or reorganises its site, which is exactly why referencing styles now prefer it.
Look for the DOI on the first page of the PDF, in the article's header or footer, on the journal's landing page, or in the record on Google Scholar, PubMed or Scopus. Databases usually offer it as a copyable string, so you rarely need to type it out.
Most referencing mistakes are transcription mistakes: a dropped co-author, a volume number confused with an issue number, an initial in the wrong place. Looking the record up removes that whole category of error, because the author list, journal title, volume, issue, pages and year all come from what the publisher registered.
It also settles the details styles disagree about. IEEE and Vancouver want initials before or after the surname respectively; APA wants initials only; Chicago wants the first author inverted and the rest natural. Once the structured metadata is in hand, each style can be generated correctly from the same record.
Registry records are supplied by publishers, and some are thinner than others. Older articles in particular may be registered without page numbers or without a full author list. When a field is missing, this tool says which one and leaves it empty rather than filling it with something plausible.
Fill those gaps from the article itself. A reference with a bracketed placeholder is a reference you still need to finish — do not submit it, and do not let a generator guess on your behalf. An invented page range is worse than a missing one, because a marker checking your sources will find it does not exist.
Journal articles, conference papers, book chapters from academic publishers, preprints on servers such as arXiv and bioRxiv, and many datasets and reports all carry DOIs. Books increasingly do as well, though older monographs generally do not.
News articles, blog posts, most websites and most government pages have no DOI. For those, use the URL citation generator or the manual generator for your style — a missing DOI is not a defect in the source, just a different kind of reference.
APA and Harvard present the DOI as a full link — https://doi.org/10.1038/nature12373 — at the end of the reference, with no full stop after it. MLA accepts either the DOI or a stable URL in the same position.
IEEE and Vancouver include the DOI at the end where the publisher provides one. Chicago places it after the page range in a journal reference. In every case, give the DOI as a resolvable link rather than the bare string where your style allows it, so a reader can follow it in one click.
Check the first page of the PDF, the journal's landing page for the article, or the database record in Google Scholar, PubMed or Scopus. It always starts with "10." — for example 10.1038/nature12373.
Yes. A link such as https://doi.org/10.1038/nature12373 works, as does a "doi:" prefix. The wrapper is stripped before the lookup runs.
Either the DOI has a typo, or it was registered with an agency other than Crossref. Check it character by character against the source, then enter the details manually if the lookup still finds nothing.
They are as correct as the publisher's registration, which is usually accurate but occasionally incomplete. Always check the result against the article before you submit — you are responsible for your reference list.
Only if they have a DOI, which most books and almost no websites do. Use the URL citation generator for web pages and the manual generator for print books.