Definition
Plain language
A large registry that assigns and tracks the permanent web links attached to published research.
As stated in the literature
A scholarly-metadata registry and DOI registration agency covering journal articles and conference papers; one of the catalogs RefChecker consults to verify citations.
Why it matters: It anchors published research to permanent links, letting both people and tools reliably trace a citation to its source.
For example, a citation-checking tool can look up a paper's DOI in CrossRef to confirm the journal article it points to really exists.
Heard on the show
“Stage two: check each reference against six big bibliographic catalogs — Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, CrossRef, DBLP, the ACL Anthology, and direct identifier lookups like DOIs and arXiv.”Episode 201 — One in Four NeurIPS Papers Cites a Reference That Doesn't Exist