What DOI field to use (DOI or ids.DOI) ?

[Ivo Bleylevens]

Dear readers,

what is the most reliable DOI field to use from the API? We have DOI or IDS.DOI to choose from. I noticed that in some cases the DOI value is not mentioned in the IDS.DOI field and this often happened where the DOI was wrong for one of the 2 works. At first, I thought I found a pattern that the wrong DOI was not listed in IDS.DOI but that is not the case.

For example these works share the same DOI:
 - https://api.openalex.org/w1932327081
 - https://api.openalex.org/w1510077522
But searching for this DOI in the API only yields one result:
https://api.openalex.org/works?filter=doi:10.1017/cbo9780511730078
So it seems the API is using the IDS.DOI field to find the result.
But this does not work though:
https://api.openalex.org/works?filter=ids.doi:10.1017/cbo9780511730078

Same holds for
https://openalex.org/W2915468618 and https://openalex.org/W1125867530
https://openalex.org/W1996971007 and https://openalex.org/W1523145097


And I have many of these cases where one DOI is used for 2 works but one DOI is not correct.
This often happens for combination of works where the title is (mostly) the same for a book-article combination or article-preprint, etc.

Someone has faced this before ?

Kind regards,
Ivo

[openresearchtools]

Hi,

I ran several comparisons between the DOI and ID DOI fields in OpenAlex, and before the migration to Walden (when many things started breaking), the two matched perfectly across thousands of papers. I didn’t encounter a single mismatch in my datasets. I haven’t tested this on Walden yet — I’m still relying on the legacy dataset while it remains available, since Walden currently seems to have multiple issues.