Publisher Item Identifier


The Publisher Item Identifier is a unique identifier used by a number of scientific journal publishers to identify documents. 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 is a 17-character string, consisting of:
When a PII is printed, the 17-character string may be extended with punctuation characters to make it more readable to humans, as in Sxxxx-xxxxiiiii-d or Bx-xxx-xxxxx-x/iiiii-d.

Example