Why link using this method?

When linking to publications – especially those in professional or scholarly journals – it's important to remember:

• Web profiles are intended to be useful for visitors and colleagues outside UT Health, as well as those here at UT Health.
• For journals that require a subscription to view full text, viewers may need to go through their own libraries or subscriptions to get access to the full text, just as we go through our own library to do so.
• Not all profile viewers may have access to full text for all articles, so we should link to a place where they can at least view article information and abstract without having to log in -- and then from there, go on to the full text if they wish and have access.

How to link to publications

The best way to achieve the approach above is to use one of two standard publication identifiers to link to a publication: the PubMed ID (PMID) or the Digital Object Identifier (DOI).

PMID: where to find it

Any article or publication indexed and findable in PubMed (http://pubmed.gov) will be assigned a PMID. This will include most publications across the health sciences, but coverage tends to be more complete in medicine and dentistry than in nursing and allied or adjacent health fields. A PMID will be an all-numeric identifier; for most recent articles, it will be 8 digits long, although older PMIDs have fewer digits. If a given publication is not available in PubMed, skip to the sections below on using a DOI.

There are two easy ways to find the PMID for a given article. First, if that article has been cited in another publication, that citation will often include the PMID. Second, you can simply search for the article or publication in PubMed itself; if you find the record for that article, it will show the PMID:

PMID: creating a link with it

Once you have the PMID, you can simply add it to the end of https://pubmed.gov/ and you’ll get a working URL or web address for that publication. Using the example shown above, if the PMID is 16843778, then the URL will be https://pubmed.gov/16843778. You can then take that URL and use it as the target for a hyperlink in a web profile.

DOI: where to find it

The Digital Object Identifier (DOI) is an even more ubiquitous identifier than the PMID because it is used across nearly all scholarly publications and many other publications as well. DOIs will always start with the number 10 followed by a period (“10.”) followed by four more digits and a slash (“/”), followed by additional numbers, letters, slashes and/or symbols.

Like the PMID, one easy way to find the DOI is by looking at a citation for the publication. Style manuals such as APA and MLA recommend including the DOI in the citation whenever one is available. Another option is to search for the article at https://search.crossref.org/.

DOI: creating a link with it

Once you have the DOI, you can simply add it to the end of https://doi.org/ and you’ll get a working URL or web address for that publication. For example, if the DOI is 10.1016/j.cursur.2006.03.004, then the URL will be https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cursur.2006.03.004. You can then take that URL and use it as the target for a hyperlink in a web profile.