The persistent identification of digital entities (e.g., research outputs, people, organizations, awards, etc.) can increase discoverability of research, alleviating data validation issues and reducing researcher burden.

By increasing discoverability of research-related objects, user communities can track their research over time and develop methods for finding, reproducing, and reusing research. PIDs are an essential component to developing mechanisms for human-machine interoperability, which helps promote improved citation and reference tracking.

PIDs are not just for journal articles and datasets. DOE OSTI collects DOIs for many different research product types (e.g. conference papers, conference proceedings, journal articles, etc.). And OSTI's DOI Services provide DOI assignment and registration for technical reports, conference posters and presentations, data, software, and awards.

By using DOIs (sourced via Crossref and OSTI.GOV), references to DOE-funded research in the OSTI corpus can be identified and analyzed over time. The bar chart on the left displays the number of citations to records in the OSTI corpus (based on the record's DOI), and the tree map on the far right show the dominant topic areas for each citation year.

Interact with the bar chart by hovering on or clicking on a year. To see the total number of citations for a given year, hover over the year. Clicking on a specific year will refresh the tree map of citations by field, showing the top seven (7) fields by citation volume for that year. Interact with the tree map by hovering over a topic to see the number of citations by field; clicking on a field will drill into subfields, hovering over a subfield will display the subfield's full name and its associated number of citations.