DOIs at UMass Dartmouth

By Matt Sylvain

Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs) are an important and ubiquitous part of online scholarly communication. They help provide persistent linking through the use of unique alphanumeric strings. You’ll see them assigned to a variety of scholarly material, including journal articles, dissertations/theses, and conference proceedings. They appear in bibliographies and journal websites and are a required component of modern citations. For example, this page addresses when to include digital object identifiers (DOIs) and uniform resource locators (URLs) in APA Style references.

The benefit of DOIs to authors, researchers, and publishers is their reliability. URLs can change, while DOIs are static and a more reliable way to ensure that research traffic gets to its intended destination.

You may have noticed that DOIs follow a common syntax and all look very similar. They contain a prefix that begins with “10.” followed by the publisher’s identifier. So, a publisher’s DOI prefix is always the same and can be used to determine whether two DOIs are for works by the same publisher. For example, UMass Dartmouth’s prefix is 10.62791. All DOIs published by the University will begin with this number.

DOIs also contains a suffix, which are opaque strings created by the publisher. The prefix and suffix are often preceded by a DOI resolver. Here’s an example from the CrossRef website:

Until now, the library has helped researchers and scholars understand and use DOIs, but it has not created the identifiers. To do so, the library needed to join a registration agency. Agencies provide the oversight necessary to ensure a functioning system. For example, I can imagine publishers accidently reusing DOIs, duplicating an existing DOI, and not using a consistent prefix if agencies didn’t exist. This spring, the library joined CrossRef, a non-profit used by many universities to mint DOIs for their scholarly publications. This summer we hope to begin assigning DOIs to articles in Tagus Press’s Portuguese Literary & Cultural Studies, a peer-reviewed journal which is published semi-annually at UMass Dartmouth. We will eventually  expand  the identifiers to the University’s electronic theses and dissertations.

If you have questions, feel free to reach out to us at libsys@umassd.edu.

Research and Publishing Roundup

Kudos to the following members of our UMass Dartmouth community on their research or publishing accomplishment:

Kevin StokesburyDean of the School for Marine Science & Technologywas featured in an article about a controversial new compensation program for fishermen in Massachusetts who fish within offshore wind farms.

Debra Duarte (SMAST Doctoral Candidate) and Professor Steve Cadrin (Fisheries Oceanography) co-published “Review of methodologies for detecting an observer effect in commercial fisheries data” in Fisheries Research. Based on Duarte’s doctoral dissertation, the article examines the power and error rate of several published methods for detecting an observer effect using a simulation of observer and deployment effects at varying sampling ratios for several sample statistics.

An article written by the College of Nursing & Health Sciences faculty and published in the Journal of Nursing Scholarship ranked in the top 10% of papers downloaded. The article “Perceived stigma, barriers, and facilitators experienced by members of the opioid use disorder community when seeking healthcare” was written by the NO STIGMA team, led by Professor Mary McCurry, and including co-authors Assistant Professor Shannon Avery-DesmaraisAssociate Professor Monika SchulerAssociate Professor Jennifer ViveirosAssistant Professor Mirinda Tyo, and Brianna Kauranen (Psychology MA Candidate). The article focuses on the perceived stigma, barriers, and facilitators faced by members of the opioid disorder community when seeking healthcare.

Professor Chad McGuire (Public Policy) participated in the panel “Rising Seas and How We Adapt.” The panel discussed climate change-induced rising seas and how to adapt to extreme environmental changes.

Professor Brian Williams (History) commented on the interview between Tucker Carlson and Vladimir Putin. Williams provided an analysis of the current state of the Ukraine War and how it could change due to the upcoming American presidential election.

Research Assistant Drake Ssempijja (SMAST Doctoral Candidate) and Professor Pingguo He (Fisheries Oceanography) co-published “Abandoned, lost, and otherwise discarded fishing gear in world’s inland fisheries” in the Reviews in Fish Biology and Fisheries. The article describes how abandoned, lost, and discarded fishing gear in inland fisheries remains a highly understudied area of aquatic plastic pollution.

Professor Emeritus James J. Bisagni (Estuarine & Ocean Sciences) recently published “Surface Eddy Kinetic Energy Variability of the Western North Atlantic Slope Sea” in Continental Shelf Research. This work analyzed satellite altimeter-derived changes in eddy kinetic energy to better understand the seasonal and interannual variation of Gulf Stream warm-core rings within the Slope Sea.

Michael S. Cahill (’21) and Associate Professor Nikolay Anguelov (Public Policy) co-published “Hedonic analysis of willingness to pay for dam removal: evidence from Plymouth, Massachusetts” in the Journal of Environmental Planning and Management. The article investigates how the removal of small dams and subsequent river restoration investments affect residential housing prices in Plymouth. The article is based on Cahill’s capstone project.

Do you need help accessing any of these publications? The librarians have you covered. Contact our reference staff: https://lib.umassd.edu/about/staff-directory/contact-rils/

Enhance Your Academic Writing with Citation Tools

by Kari Mofford

While it would be nice if all the academic leaders in APA, MLA, Chicago…etc. could all get together and create one citation style to rule them all…it probably won’t happen soon.  In the meantime, we do have tools to help us figure out these styles.  While citation generators like Citation Machine are great, they should be checked for accuracy, as it’s not unheard of for them to have typos, issues with capitalization, or other mistakes.  They are just pulling information from fields and their data is only as good as what they harvest.  Check out our Libguide for some good sources on many of the styles.

Another tool that can be very helpful is a Citation Management system. This is a great thing to have if you are gathering multiple citations for your thesis, dissertation, research paper, etc.  Here at the Claire T. Carney Library we support Zotero, which is free!  We have a Libguide on how to download it onto your laptop and lots of information to set up your account.  It makes it very easy to capture your citations, organize them, and create in-text citations and bibliographies.  Like citation generators, you should still double check the citations after they are in Zotero for accuracy, but it’s a great product and invaluable for projects requiring the gathering of many, many citations.  Don’t hesitate to reach out to your librarian to ask for assistance with any citation questions!

 

A New System for Submitting Book Adoptions (And Finding OER Too!)

by Emma Wood

Gone are the days of emailing a list of your required course materials to the bookstore staff, traversing COIN to submit course material requests, or both. New this semester, our campus store has implemented a system called Follett Discover which enables faculty to search for material, manage their course adoptions, and make changes as needed all in one virtual location.

Here are some of the key features of this new system:

  • Follett Discover is integrated with COIN, and it personalizes your dashboard by automatically populating the information about the courses you teach.
  • There is a “re-adopt” option through which you can efficiently declare the same materials that you have used in past semesters.
  • Use the search tool to discover publications by title, ISBN, or topic.
  • The “create content” option allows you to curate a course with a collection of articles or other material.
  • Add course supplies like kits, lab materials, and barcharts.
  • Click the “OER” tab to find Open Educational Resources (OER) related to your course. This is a great option for lowering the cost of course materials for your students An example of an OER search for business law is shown below:

For an overview of the Follett Discover system, check out this brief video: https://follett.com/video/follett-discover-the-faculty-experience/