How to get DOI links in bibliography

Question

I would like to add to all my bibliography items a DOI (Digital Object Identifier) link or a link to a download location.

How can I do this with the natbib / BibTeX / hyperref combination? Currently I am using the plainnat style, but I'm willing to change that.

Duplicate of http://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/3039/bibliography-entry-containing (which comes up as the second hit when you search this site for DOI) — Seamus, Oct 06 '10 at 09:28
@Seamus No, that question is about solving a problem with doi's, while I could not figure out how to it completely. Related: yes, dupliate: no. — Peter Smit, Oct 06 '10 at 09:31
@Seamus Check for example http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&q=doi+links+bibliography+natbib It is not clear for me what the solution is. And no, on this website there was no clear answer for my question. — Peter Smit, Oct 06 '10 at 09:51
I'd agree with Peter: the question is not a duplicate (the previous one is about a very specific issue), although the relation between the two is clear. — Joseph Wright, Oct 06 '10 at 10:23
Not 100 % relevant to your question but also check this link which uses biblatex. The result is very beautiful:http://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/49564/how-do-i-turn-titles-into-hyperlinks-in-verbose-mode-using-biblatex-and-hyperref — rowman, Sep 25 '12 at 20:59
I would like to have the Journal name linked with the doi, like it's done in some jounal papers. How do you realize that? — , Oct 10 '12 at 09:26
@laclaro: Welcome to TeX.sx! Your question won't be seen by many people here, so it would be best to repost it as a fresh question. Follow-up questions like this are more than welcome! Please use the "Ask Question" link for your new question; there you can link to this question to provide the background. — Stephen, Oct 12 '12 at 14:45

score 122 · Accepted Answer · edited Oct 08 '12 at 18:31

122

Include your DOIs in the BibTeX database under the doi field and include the URLs under the url field; for example:

\begin{filecontents*}{test.bib}
@article{foo2010,
  author = "Foo Bar",
  journal = "J.P.B.",
  year = 2010,
  title = "Where the wild things are.",
  doi = {10.1.1/jpb001},
  url = {http://dx.doi.org/10.1.1/jpb001}
}
\end{filecontents*}

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{natbib,hyperref}
\begin{document}
test \citet{foo2010}
\bibliographystyle{plainnat}
\bibliography{test}
\end{document}

If you wish to hyperlink the DOI, I believe that loading the doi package will perform this automatically.

edited Oct 08 '12 at 18:31

doncherry

54,637

answered Oct 06 '10 at 07:12

Will Robertson

73,872

9

Worked great for me, I just had to download doi.sty from: http://ctan.org/tex-archive/macros/latex/contrib/doi – Quinn Taylor Jan 05 '12 at 06:50
@Will Robertson the font of the doi numbers differs from the rest of the text. Can I fix its font (or, if necessary, the size) to be coherent with the references? – Gagik Dec 21 '22 at 11:02
The font of the doi numbers differs from the rest of the text. Can I change the font style, size, color, etc. of the doi only? – Gagik Dec 22 '22 at 10:34
I seem to have a conflict between the DOI package and the verse and hyperref packages. Loading the DOI package after each one does not seem to address the conflict. Anyone else have a similar issue? – RosesBouquet Feb 04 '23 at 20:00
\usepackage{doi} solved it for me in Overleaf with natbib, abbrevnat using pdfLatex compiler. Thanks – Paloha Apr 13 '23 at 12:02

score 52 · Answer 2 · answered Oct 06 '10 at 07:26

52

A minimal change would be to use the plainurl style instead of plainnat.

You could also continue to use plainnat and give a suitable definition of \doi (to override the non-hyperlinked version \provided by plainnat), eg:

\newcommand*{\doi}[1]{\href{http://dx.doi.org/#1}{doi: #1}}

In both cases, just use a doi field in your .bib file.

answered Oct 06 '10 at 07:26

Lev Bishop

45,462

What does plainurl add? Oh, I see, hyperlinks in the DOI. Sorry, was confused for a minute. – Will Robertson Oct 06 '10 at 07:34
4

I changed the bibtex style from plainnat to plainurl, but now each reference contains both the DOI and a URL to the same DOI, e.g: "URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/0925-7721(93)90007-s, doi:10.1016/0925-7721(93)90007-s.". This is redundant. Is there a way to tell BibTeX to show only the DOI, without the URL? – Erel Segal-Halevi Aug 11 '15 at 09:53
@ErelSegal-Halevi: yes, see https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/5660/redundancy-in-bib-file-conditionally-suppress-url-if-same-as-doi?noredirect=1&lq=1 – Peter LeFanu Lumsdaine May 18 '17 at 13:52
8

Please note that the preferred DOI resolver is https://doi.org/, without the dx subdomain. – Katrin Leinweber Jan 11 '19 at 19:18

score 39 · Answer 3 · edited Apr 13 '17 at 12:35

I came across this thread recently while solving a variant of Peter's question.

Instead of adding a hyperlink DOI to each of the bibliography items, you may want not to write the DOI explicitly but to make another field of the bibliographic item clickable with an hyperlink to the download location. In some journals, the hyperlink is associated to the group "Journal Name, volume, page number" for instance. You may find some existing bibliography style files doing that, but sometimes you need to add this feature to a personal bibliography style. In this case, none of the above solutions work. The hack I came up with is to define the following function in the .bst file:

FUNCTION {doilink}
{ duplicate$ empty$
{ pop$ "" }
{ doi empty$
    { skip$ }
    { "\href{http://dx.doi.org/" doi * "}{" * swap$ * "}" * }
  if$
}
if$
}

Here is an example of how to call the function:

FUNCTION {format.vol.num.pages}
{ volume field.or.null
  boldface
  pages empty$
    'skip$
    { duplicate$ empty$
    { pop$ format.pages }
    {  ", " * pages first.page.number * }
      if$
    }
  if$
  doilink
}

In this case the volume and pages will be hyperlinks. In general the hyperlink will be associated to the item on the top of the stack when the function doilink is called. You also need to make sure that the doi is declared as a possible field for bibliographic entries. As a minimal example:

ENTRY
{ author
  doi
  journal
  key
  pages
  title
  volume
  year
}

This may not be the most robust solution but it solved my problem. I thought it might be useful to some people here.

EDIT

Following @laclaro 's follow-up question, I add an example of a .tex file calling the modified .bst file:

\documentclass{article}

\usepackage{natbib}

\usepackage{color}
\definecolor{darkblue}{rgb}{0.,0.,0.4}
\definecolor{darkred}{rgb}{0.5,0.,0.}

\usepackage[pdftex,colorlinks=true,linkcolor=darkblue,citecolor=darkred,urlcolor=blue]{hyperref}

\usepackage{filecontents}

\begin{filecontents}{\jobname.bib}
@article{Brune1996,
    Author = {Brune, M  and Hagley, E and Dreyer, J and Maître, X and  Maali, A and Wunderlich, C and Raimond,J.M. and Haroche,S },
    Title = {Observing the Progressive Decoherence of the “Meter” in a Quantum Measurement},
    Year = {1996},
    Journal = {Phys. Rev. Lett.},
    volume = {77},
    pages = {4887},
    doi = {10.1103/PhysRevLett.77.4887}}
\end{filecontents}


\begin{document}

\cite{Brune1996}

\bibliographystyle{mystyle}
\bibliography{\jobname}

\end{document}

and a screenshot of what it looks like:

enter image description here

Here, clicking on the volume or page number opens the doi link. To adapt this so that the hyperlink is on the journal, you would need to modify the function FUNCTION {format.journal} in the .bst style file rather than the FUNCTION {format.vol.num.pages} as was done here.

with biblatex and the eprint field, you can also add arxiv or oai links as offered by the Hal open archive http://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/. See http://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/4972/oai-field-in-bibtex-biblatex — pluton, Jul 25 '12 at 22:38
How would one extend this code to use the url field if the doi field is not present? https://tex.stackexchange.com/q/565638/45154 — mrupp, Oct 08 '20 at 10:48

matth · Answer 4 · 2013-09-24T07:29:42.547

30

Will Robertson showed how to do it with natbib and hyperref (as requested by the original poster). The most important point is of course to have a doi field in your bib file.
Another solution would be to use biblatex instead of natbib. My experience is that biblatexis at the same time very flexible and very stable, especially when some fileds (e.g name or doi) contain strange/special characters. Here is a MWE that should compile fine as it is:

\documentclass[english]{article}

\usepackage[autostyle]{csquotes}
\usepackage[
    backend=biber,
    style=authoryear,
    natbib=true,
    sortlocale=en_US,
    url=false, 
    doi=true,
    eprint=false
]{biblatex}
\addbibresource{biblatex-examples.bib}

\usepackage{hyperref}
\hypersetup{colorlinks=true}

\begin{document}
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet~\citep{kastenholz}.
At vero eos et accusam et justo~\citet{sigfridsson}.
\printbibliography
\end{document}

edited Sep 24 '13 at 07:29

answered Oct 25 '11 at 11:04

matth

12,381

Thanks for the answer! I have a further question, is it possible to have the doi field point to the address specified by url? Because prepending http://dx.doi.org/ would point you to an address which would likely redirect you again, then it makes sense for us to put the actual address in url and let doi link directly to its value. – zyy Jan 13 '20 at 05:37
1

The URL might change, the DOI is a permanent identifier. So, please always use the DOI where possible. The redirect is not a problem, it is part of the solution. – matth Jan 13 '20 at 08:24
Thanks, that make sense! – zyy Jan 13 '20 at 14:59
@matth Note that both crossref and datacite explicitly recommend displaying DOIs using complete URLs (see data cite link for reasons). I am also interested in learning how to get biblatex to do this (i.e. add the https://doi.org/ prefix when displaying the doi field). – leopold.talirz Aug 12 '21 at 12:11
1

@leopold.talirz See this issue. You can just add \DeclareFieldFormat{doi}{\url{https://doi.org/#1}}. – Heisenbugs Jul 31 '22 at 10:10

score 26 · Answer 5 · edited Mar 23 '18 at 13:23

26

@Lev: that worked, although DOIs can contain special latex characters like underscores, such as:

https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-08755-9_9

So I modified your hack to:

\newcommand*{\doi}[1]{\href{https://doi.org/\detokenize{#1}}{doi: \detokenize{#1}}}

edited Mar 23 '18 at 13:23

koppor

3,252

answered Jun 02 '11 at 20:53

user5915

261

2

Some of the strangest DOIs I have in my .bib file are: http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/1521-4001(200209)82:9<579::AID-ZAMM579>3.0.CO;2-V and http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/1521-4125(200007)23:7<581::AID-CEAT581>3.0.CO;2-P – matth Feb 16 '12 at 12:06
1

See http://tex.stackexchange.com/q/3039/627 for more discussion of weird characters in doi strings. – Lev Bishop May 01 '12 at 18:08
This prevents doi's from having line breaks. Helpful: http://tex.stackexchange.com/q/50023/41276 – usr1234567 Mar 08 '17 at 15:56

score 11 · Answer 6 · answered Aug 12 '13 at 09:46

My reference section requires to output doi's also in the bibliography. Inspired from Corentin's solution, I come up with the following hack in the .bst file:

I add a doi field in the ENTRY section, if it does not contain:

ENTRY
{ 
    address
    ...
    year
    doi
}

Next, I define a function output.doi

FUNCTION {output.doi}
{ 
    doi empty$
        { skip$ }
        { "\href{http://dx.doi.org/" doi * "}{doi:" * doi * "}" * output }
    if$
}

Then, in the entries that I want to report doi field, I call this function, after a new block. In my case, it is required at the end, before the notes:

FUNCTION {article}
{ 
    ...
    new.block
    output.doi
    new.block
    note output
    fin.entry
}

I added the doi field to article, inproceedings and incollection types.

For a bib entry with doi = {10.1007/978-3-642-20946-8\_2}, this solution displays a doi:10.1007/978-3-642-20946-8_2 reference at the bibliography, and when clicked it links to http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-20946-8_2 address.

score 6 · Answer 7 · answered Mar 16 '16 at 13:12

Just adding my piece, I have myself revised the .bst style I wanted (apalike) to include ISBN, ISSN, DOI, and URL. I did not find any "apalikeurl" version so far, so I did it myself. It builds links for DOIs and ISBNs, and for ISBNs it is even capable of managing several IDs in the same field (i.e. one link for each).

https://github.com/matthieu-vergne/LaTeX/blob/master/apalike-refs.bst

Now I wonder if there is a way to use options for the style to say which IDs to accept for the display. I made all that just yesterday and did not have the time to investigate further. Comments and fixes are also welcome.

score 2 · Answer 8 · answered May 26 '21 at 08:38

For anyone interested in unsrt style, i used the code here and modified a line with the help from a reply here and it worked perfectly as I wanted.

The modified part of the code:

FUNCTION {article}
{ output.bibitem
format.authors "author" output.check
new.block
format.title "title" output.check
new.block
crossref missing$
{ journal emphasize "journal" output.check
    format.vol.num.pages output
    format.date "year" output.check
}
{ format.article.crossref output.nonnull
    format.pages output
}
if$
format.doi output
new.block
output.doi
note output
fin.entry
}

Save the code to your directory as "unsrtDOI.bst" and at the end of your latex file:

\bibliography{b.bib}
\bibliographystyle{unsrtDOI}

score 0 · Answer 9 · answered Jun 05 '22 at 16:35

A possible workaround is to include them in the notes field of your .bib. Some bibliography management tools do that when exporting, like the PMID to bib converter https://www.bioinformatics.org/texmed/

It automatically provides a notes field with the appropriate content:

\href{<Link to PUBMED>}{<PMID #>}

score 0 · Answer 10 · answered Feb 04 '23 at 18:48

0

You can add the url as an additional note in the following way

@article{Foi,

Author = {ABC},
...
 ....
note={\url{https://doi.org/10.1006/s00454-016-00156-0}},

answered Feb 04 '23 at 18:48

Arun

101

Praveen · Answer 11 · 2020-09-15T11:20:51.360

-1

For IEEE style numerical citation, import package natlib with option numbers:

\usepackage[numbers]{natlib}

Source: More Options,page 5

edited Sep 15 '20 at 11:20

answered Sep 15 '20 at 11:15

Praveen

1

How to get DOI links in bibliography

11 Answers11

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