Resolution Report

Resolution reports are sent out via email at the beginning of each month and includes statistics about DOI resolutions from the previous month.  Resolution reports are sent by default to the business contact provided for your organization, but we can add or change the recipient(s) as needed. We send you a separate report for each DOI prefix you’re responsible for.

The statistics are based on the number of DOI resolutions through the DOI proxy server (https://doi.org/) on a month-by-month basis. These statistics give an indication of the traffic generated by users clicking DOIs. The DOI links are largely from links in other publishers' journal references to articles, but they are also from DOI links in secondary databases, links from libraries using DOIs, and even DOIs in used in print versions.

The report includes:

• Resolution failure rate: the percentage of DOI resolution attempts that failed. The prefix failure rate and the overall failure rate (for all Crossref members) are also included.
• Resolutions by month: total number of resolutions per month for the past 12 months, by prefix (Count) and overall (All Members).
• Resolution stats: resolution counts for the report prefix. 
• Top ten DOIs: list of the ten DOIs with the highest number of successful resolutions for the month, and the number of times each DOI was successfully resolved. 
• Failed DOIs: a list of DOI resolution attempts that failed (i.e. resolved to a Handle error page). This list is presented as a .csv file attached to the report email and contains both the failed DOI and number of failures. 

We do our best to filter out known search engine crawlers. The overall number of filtered crawler resolutions for the month is included in the report.  

See Working with your resolution report for tips on troubleshooting high failure rates.

What is a resolution and how does it work?

A resolution is the action that occurs when a DOI link (e.g., https://doi.org/10.1038/nature02426) is clicked by a user. Successful resolutions resolve (or hyperlink) the end user to the resource URL that was deposited to Crossref via your metadata submission. Failures indicate that at the time of the attempted resolution, the end user was not resolved to a resource URL. These failures may be the result of deposit errors by the publisher, linking errors being made by end users, or timing in the member-publisher’s workflow (i.e., the DOI link was attempted to be resolved before the DOI had been registered with Crossref).

For example, clicking on https://doi.org/10.1038/nature02426 counts as one resolution to Nature. No information is captured about the user, and these numbers are not a precise measure of traffic to a member's website.