Publisher Item Identifier

The Publisher Item Identifier (PII) is a unique identifier used by a number of scientific journal publishers to identify documents.^[1] 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 ISBN (10 characters) 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 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 S0960-894X(96)00515-X can be broken down as, where

• S - Indicates the publication is a serial, not a book
• 0960-894X - ISSN 0960-894X for the publication Bioorganic & Medicinal Chemistry Letters
• 96 - Padding/Year Code (1996)
• 00515 - Publisher's internal number
• X - Check digit

This is the PII for a scientific paper by Silvie Géhanne et al.:

• Géhanne, Sylvie; Piga, Elisabetta; Andreotti, Daniele; Biondi, Stefano; Pizzi, Domenica (1996). "Synthesis and antibacterial, activity of 4-ureido trinems". Bioorganic & Medicinal Chemistry Letters. 6 (22): 2791–2794. doi:10.1016/S0960-894X(96)00515-X.

DOI

PII codes can be used as the item ID in a DOI identifier.^[2] In the previous example, the number 10.1016 is the DOI's publisher ID (Elsevier), a slash acts as a separator, followed by the PII code S0960-894X(96)00515-X.

See also

• Serial Item and Contribution Identifier (SICI)
• Digital Object Identifier (DOI)
• OpenURL