This blog post provides some background to a recent tweet where I expressed my frustration about the duplication of DOIs for the same article. I'm going to document the details here.

I've stumbled on a case where two different publishers have issued different DOIs for the same articles. In this case, Springer and J-State both publish the Japanese Journal of Ichthyology (ISSN 0021-5090). The following article: is published by Springer with the DOI http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/BF02914322, and this DOI is registered with CrossRef. J-Stage publish the same article, with the DOI (http://dx.doi.org/10.11369/jji1950.36.196).

Quick note that as much as I like that the Biodiversity Heritage Library is using DOIs, they are generating them for publications that already have them (or are acquiring them from other sources). For example, here are the two DOIs for the same article (formatted using the DOI Citation Formatter), one from BHL and one from the Smithsonian: The BHL DOI resolves to a page in BHL, the other DOI resolves to the a page in the Smithsonian Digital

Duplicate records are the bane of any project that aggregates data from multiple sources.

As part of a project to map taxonomic citations to bibliographic identifiers I'm tackling strings like this (from the ION record urn:lsid:organismnames.com:name:1405511 for Pseudomyrmex crudelis ): Systematics, biogeography and host plant associations of the Pseudomyrmex viduus group (Hymenoptera: Formicidae), Triplaris- and Tachigali-inhabiting ants. Zoological Journal of the Linnean Society, 126(4), August 1999: 451-540.

One issue I'm running into with Mendeley is that it can create spurious documents, mangling my references in the process. This appears to be due to some over-zealous attempts to de-duplicate documents.

I think this isn't supposed to happen, but here's a paper with two DOIs. The first DOI is doi:10.1651/0278-0372(1997)17[253:MPAOTC]2.0.CO;2, which links to a record served by BIOONE.