Adopting DOI in Legal Citation: A Roadmap for the Legal Academy

Virtual Symposium on Citation and the Law, April 22-23, 2021

University of Utah College of Law Research Paper No. 424

26 Pages Posted: 10 Mar 2021 Last revised: 13 Apr 2021

See all articles by Valeri Craigle

Valeri Craigle

James E. Faust Law Library; University of Utah - S.J. Quinney College of Law

Date Written: March 8, 2021

Abstract

A Digital Object Identifier (DOI) is a unique string of numbers, letters, and symbols used to identify web-based information assets such as articles, multimedia items, and datasets. A digital object minted with a DOI will be persistently discoverable through this identifier, as long as it lives on the Web.

DOIs are already ubiquitous in citations in the medical and scientific literature, primarily because the discovery of, access to, and linkages between the scholarship in these disciplines happens almost exclusively online. As is true with most content on the web, scholarly content in the sciences is published on multiple platforms and may be archived in multiple locations. In light of the fact that one may be hard-pressed to create a reliable static URL that other researchers can refer to under these circumstances, those who publish in the sciences have arrived at a consensus that DOIs are the gold standard for making research outputs easier to find, use, and share.

Why, then, has the legal academy largely eschewed DOIs for legal citation? Discussions are certainly taking place, but currently there are no practical guidelines for implementing DOIs in legal citations. The Bluebook takes no position on them and authors and law review editors either ignore them or are largely unaware of their benefits.

This paper argues that the implementation and development of a standard for DOI in legal citation is long past due. It will lay out a roadmap for legal scholars, institutions, and vendors for implementing DOI, with helpful tips for authors, librarians, and law journals on minting DOIs; and will provide examples for the Bluebook on what a rule for integrating DOI in legal citation might look like.

Keywords: persistent identifiers, digital stewardship, digital collections, digital object identifiers, DOI

Suggested Citation

Craigle, Valeri, Adopting DOI in Legal Citation: A Roadmap for the Legal Academy (March 8, 2021). Virtual Symposium on Citation and the Law, April 22-23, 2021, University of Utah College of Law Research Paper No. 424, Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3800465

Valeri Craigle (Contact Author)

James E. Faust Law Library ( email )

383 S. University Street
Salt Lake City, UT 84112-0730
United States

University of Utah - S.J. Quinney College of Law ( email )

383 S. University Street
Salt Lake City, UT 84112-0730
United States

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