References for RAE: URLs and DOIs

The 2008 RAE submissions require, for journal articles that are available online, the URL (Web address) and the DOI (Digital Object Identifier (Web address that won't move!))

To help you find these, you can use the free DOI lookup tool at http://www.crossref.org/guestquery/ You type the bibliographic details of the article into the boxes and it will return the DOI. You may prefer http://www.crossref.org/freeTextQuery/ where you can copy in your reference in a single line in the format shown. (Maximimise the window first!)

You should be able to track down the DOI of your papers provided that:
a) the publisher is a member of CrossRef - most are, see http://www.crossref.org/01company/06publishers.html
b) the publisher has registered the DOI in the CrossRef database (very recently published articles may not be in there.)

If the publisher is in CrossRef, but this tool doesn't return the DOI then you can usually find it on the e-journal site for the article, by viewing the table of contents, abstract or full-text.

URLs for e-journal articles are often very long, and not necessarily re-usable, so if you can find the DOI using the tool above I would suggest quoting the URL as: http://dx.doi.org/ ... where you replace ... with the actual DOI for the article.

Otherwise, just provide the URL for the Abstract or Full-Text of the article, by right-clicking a link to it and choosing 'Copy shortcut'.

If all this sounds like too much hassle, please feel free to call upon your subject librarian, listed at http://www.liv.ac.uk/Library/subjects/engineer/eng/engcontact.html to find the DOIs and URLs for you. And please let us know if there's anything else we can do to help the RAE process.

Update: there is now a Library Web page on RAE Submissions: DOIs and URLs