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All Things Must Change to Something New...

estern{at}u.washington.edu

 
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807-1882)

And changes are still happening here at the AJR. For 2006, we continue to move the journal to new and exciting intellectual and electronic heights. Among the many new changes, one of the most important to announce is that, as of January 1, 2006, the online version of AJR is now the official journal of record. The print version is alive and well, but it is no longer the official archive. Even with our conversion to electronic manuscript submission and peer review in October 2003, the paper journal was still king, but no longer. To what do we owe this electronic coup d'etat? Digital Object Identifiers, DOI for short. So what exactly is a DOI, and how can it be used so powerfully? Well, put simply, a DOI is an alphanumeric string created to uniquely identify a piece of digital intellectual property in an online environment. This means that once a DOI is assigned to a particular piece of intellectual property, such as a particular journal article, the DOI is permanently assigned to that content regardless of the owner, helping users get to the authoritative, published version of the content for which they are searching. For example, the DOI, in virtual perpetuity, for this particular piece of intellectual property in AJR would be: 10.2214/AJR.06.0321. DOIs now can allow articles to be "unlinked" from a specific issue, or even page number, of the journal. Because a DOI link is a persistent virtual link, unlike a Web site address, a reliable citation is created, allowing users to move from one article to another at the citation level, regardless of journal or publisher, depending upon access privileges.

Following in the footsteps of other very scholarly journals and publishers, the AJR and the ARRS will now participate with the nonprofit organization CrossRef (www.crossref.org), the official DOI registration agency for over 1,400 scholarly and professional publishers, and more than 17 million registered items. This collaboration among publishers makes reference linking reliable and provides metadata to streamline web crawling, all in all making access to content discovery easier and more efficient. CrossRef is not an article database or search interface. The costs of this citation linking are free to the end-user. Subscribers to that journal will have full text access, and nonsubscribed users will be presented with other options for access. From the CrossRef mission statement: "The specific CrossRef mission is to be the citation linking backbone for all scholarly information in electronic form. CrossRef is a collaborative reference linking service that functions as a sort of digital switchboard. It holds no full text content, but rather effects linkages through Digital Object Identifiers (DOI), which are tagged to article metadata supplied by the participating publishers. The end result is an efficient, scalable linking system through which a researcher can click on a reference citation in a journal and access the cited article" [1].

What can you, the AJR reader, expect? Clicking on a CrossRef link within the online AJR will automatically connect to a page on that publisher's Web site showing a full bibliographical citation of the article, and, in most cases, the abstract as well. The bottom line is that CrossRef and DOIs make articles easier to find.

In this April 2006 issue of the AJR, I would like to highlight several manuscripts that I believe our readership will find particularly useful for problem-solving in practice of radiology. Certainly solitary pulmonary nodules are a very common occurrence in most practices. In the ongoing development of the use of semiautomatic volumetric measurements of detected lung nodules, Dr. Goodman and colleagues report on the inherent variability of CT lung nodule measurements, and include recommendations on how to minimize this inherent variability. In another area of common interest in practice, Dr. Patel and colleagues report on the use of likelihood ratios of different sonographic findings in discriminating hydrosalpinx from other cystic adnexal masses to convey a high level of confidence in the diagnosis. In this era of cost containment, our readers should find the article by Dr. van Breda Vriesman and colleagues on the mimics of appendicitis, presenting alternative nonsurgical diagnoses at sonography and CT that are self-limiting or that can be treated conservatively, to be a worthwhile pictorial review of the topic. Lastly, Dr. Stacey and colleagues present an informative review article (with free CME credit) on the staging of bone tumors, which contains new and useful information, particularly emphasizing recent changes to the bone tumor staging classification system.

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1. http://www.crossref.org/01company/02history.html. Accessed February 20, 2006

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This Article Full Text (PDF) Alert me when this article is cited Alert me if a correction is posted Services Email this article to a friend Similar articles in this journal Similar articles in PubMed Alert me to new issues of the journal Download to citation manager Citing Articles Citing Articles via HighWire Citing Articles via Google Scholar Google Scholar Articles by Stern, E. J. Search for Related Content PubMed PubMed Citation Articles by Stern, E. J. Social Bookmarking                      What's this?