The SICI Standard

JSTOR uses Serial Item and Contribution Identifiers (SICIs) to create direct URLs to our articles. SICIs are very useful for linking purposes because they are based upon citation information. For the most part, JSTOR is accurate to the SICI specification. Currently, a SICI can be used to link to any article, issue or volume within the JSTOR database.

What is a SICI?

SICI stands for Serial Item and Contribution Identifier. SICI was developed out of the Serials Industry Systems Advisory Committee (or SISAC). It is an ANSI/NISO standard and was developed to uniquely identify serial items (issues) and their contributions (articles) and "is intended to be applicable to both automated parsing and human-readable environments". It is also compatible with both DOI and URN.

Why Use SICIs?

In order for outside organizations to maintain links to JSTOR articles, the links must remain stable and consistent no matter how the JSTOR data is stored. URLs can and do change with the architecture of the serving site and therefore are not good identifiers of digital objects. JSTOR is using SICIs to create persistent, static URLs, which are derivable from the citation information of the target articles.

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