ShortDOI Service (2013)

shortdoi.org

26 points·cifkao··10 comments

I made a script to convert all DOIs in a bibtex file to short DOIs. It's at https://github.com/domoritz/shorty. And yes, it uses regexes.

For whatever reason, having not heard of DOI before only to see it referred to as "DOI®" is massively off-putting.

It’s widely used for scientific publications. Actually the main real utility of DOI are coupled with Sci-Hub.

Having a DOI is also a small credibility boost and can help with citation managment.

the last line of the page "Updated 2 April 2013".

Even it might exist for more than 8 years, I never see it used in the wild

> as aliases for existing DOI names, which are often very long strings.

Probably because the problem it tries to solve is mostly a non-problem in practice. I've hardly ever seen "very long" DOIs. In fact most I encounter on a day to day basis are so short that you could reasonably spell them out loud if you'd have to.

EDIT: Okay, it's better than I expected. It currently gives you a 4 character id (e.g. https://doi.org/f655), which is so short that e.g. one would quickly copy it from a presentation slide.

Some Wiley DOIs are ridiculous long and ugly. For those i use shortDOI. IEEE DOIs seem fine.

I personally use it whenever I give a presentation, to cite a scientific work. Makes copying the reference much easier for the audience and helps to reduce clutter...

And yet apparently, it still works. (source: I just created one and looked it up on doi.org)

I came across DOIs for the first time last week, when I saw a badge on a webpage.

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