ISSN, ISBN, DOI explained in easy way
View more posts Researchers Quest
There are three types of Publication Identifiers: 1. ISBN (International Standard Book Numbers). 2. ISSN (International Standard Serial Numbers). 3. DOI (Digital Object Identifier).
https://s1.wp.com/i/favicon.ico
Researcher's Quest
By Chandan Taluja, Researcher’s Quest, a blog by Learning with Chandan

The publication process of Journal article involves:

Writing the manuscript

Submitting the manuscript to a suitable journal

Peer review of the manuscript

Acceptance of the manuscript by the Journal Editor

And finally, online/offline publication of the journal article.

It has been observed that post publication of article, two or more submissions might carry same article title, or even in some cases, there might be two different authors with the same full name, or even same keywords.

In such cases, the role of Publication Identifiers comes into light.

Publication Identifiers are the metrics which solve the above stated problems.

There are three types of Publication Identifiers:

ISBN (International Standard Book Numbers).

ISSN (International Standard Serial Numbers).

DOI (Digital Object Identifier).

ISBN assists in identification of a particular book amongst many books available in the markets. In the process of book publication, each book is assigned a unique 13-digit ISBN number. ISBN number is printed on the back-side of the book, accompanied by a barcode in some cases.

ISBN number consists of 5 elements, namely:

ISBN prefix,

Group/Country Identifier,

Publisher Identifier

Title Identifier

Checksum

ISSN number is an 8-digit number which identifies a serial publication such as magazines or journals published after periodic time.

DOI number is a commonly known term in the researcher’s community. Every journal paper is assigned its unique DOI number.

Even if two journal papers have same name, the DOI number will be different for each of them. Unique DOI number helps in identifying the desired journal paper out of the list of journals.

Publication Identifiers (ISBN, ISSN and DOI) are useful for the research community for identifying desired research entity among others even if the name/title of the entities is same as others.

By Chandan Taluja, Researcher’s Quest, a blog by Learning with Chandan