Capture Electronic Article Numbers Without Inventing Pages

Identify how the journal locates the article

Look at the article's suggested citation and the issue table of contents. Some journals use an electronic location identifier in the place normally occupied by a page range. The identifier can contain letters, leading zeros, or punctuation. Store it as text in an article-number field alongside the journal, year, volume, and DOI.

Use the JATS elocation-id element where it is available, and compare it with the publisher display. A PDF may number its own pages from one even when the journal identifies the article by an e-locator. A page inside the PDF can still serve as an extraction location. Give those two values distinct fields so the citation locator survives export.

Inspect a hypothetical import

A journal issue contains 14 articles with electronic article numbers. A citation manager imports nine correctly and puts five into the first-page field. Of those five, two lose a leading letter during numeric conversion. Repair all five destination fields and recover the two altered values from the original issue. The review has five field-placement errors, including two character-loss errors. Counting seven affected articles would double count those two.

Re-export a corrected citation and inspect both machine-readable fields and rendered text. Keep the raw publisher locator in the source record so citation-style changes cannot turn it into a fabricated start or end page.

JATS electronic location identifier reference

Related worksheet: Extraction discrepancy resolution worksheet.

Source checked on 5 November 2026.