Introduction

This vignette explains what it means to validate scholarly identifiers against external registries and how scholidonline relates to scholid.

When working with identifiers programmatically, it is essential to distinguish between three levels of validity:

scholid operates at the structural (and, where applicable, checksum) level.

scholidonline operates at the registry level.

Structural vs Registry Validity

Structural validity answers:

Example:

scholid::is_scholid(
  "10.1000/182",
  type = "doi"
  )
#> [1] TRUE

Structural validation uses regular expressions and, where applicable, checksum algorithms (e.g., ORCID).

It does not require internet access.

It does not confirm existence.

Registry validity answers:

For example:

Example:

scholidonline::id_exists(
  "10.1000/182",
  type = "doi"
  )

Registry validation:

A structurally valid identifier may still fail registry validation.