my-server
← Wiki

Publisher Item Identifier

The Publisher Item Identifier (PII) is a unique identifier used by several scientific journal publishers to identify documents. It uses the pre-existing ISSN or ISBN of the publication in question, and adds a character for source publication type, an item number, and a check digit.

The system was adopted in 1996 by the American Chemical Society, the American Institute of Physics, the American Physical Society, Elsevier Science, and the IEEE.

Format

A PII (pii) is a 17-character string, consisting of:

  • one character to indicate source publication type: "S" = serial with ISSN, "B" = book with ISBN
  • ISSN (8 digits) or <nowiki>ISBN (10 characters)</nowiki> of the serial or book to which the publication item is primarily assigned
  • in the case of serials, an additional two-digit number to pad the difference between the 8-digit ISSN and an ISBN (suggested are the last two digits of the calendar year of the date of assignment, which is not necessarily identical to the cover date)
  • a 5-digit number assigned by the publisher that is unique to the publication item within the serial or book
  • a check digit (0-9 or X)

When a PII is printed (as opposed to stored in a database), the 17-character string may be extended with punctuation characters to make it more readable to humans, as in Sxxxx-xxxx(yy)iiiii-d or Bx-xxx-xxxxx-x/iiiii-d.

Example

The PII ()- can be broken down as, where

  • – Indicates the publication is a serial, not a book
  • – for the publication Bioorganic & Medicinal Chemistry Letters
  • – Padding/Year Code (1996)
  • – Publisher's internal number
  • – Check digit

The above example is the PII for a scientific paper by Silvie Géhanne et al. (1996):

DOI

PII codes can be used as the item ID in a DOI identifier. In the previous example, the number <code>10.1016</code> is the DOI's publisher ID (Elsevier), a slash acts as a separator, followed by the PII code <code>S0960-894X(96)00515-X</code>.

See also

References

External links