Perennial link to a research article For convenience, I often want to give a link to a research article in addition to the citation. I am mostly look for the following two properties:


the link should be valid as long as possible
the link should provide as many sources as possible to download the article, ideally free of charge whenever available.


I use Google scholar, e.g.: Godbole, Shantanu, and Sunita Sarawagi. "Discriminative methods for multi-labeled classification." Advances in Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining. Springer Berlin Heidelberg, 2004. 22-30.

I link to the "all versions" page:



Are there other any good/better alternatives?
the link should be valid as long as possible


There is no guarantee that Google Scholar will even still exist as a service in a few years, let alone that its URL scheme will stay the same. Who knows when another round of spring cleaning might come?

From the point of view of avoiding link rot, using a DOI resolver seems much better, e.g. http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-24775-3_5

Related: DOI® System and Persistent URLs


  Is there any DOI resolver that points to multiple sources, including free ones when available?


Citeseer does this, e.g. http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.1.3819 - but unlike http://doi.org they have made no commitment to maintain this service in perpetuity. And they don't seem to be using standard DOIs, but their own internal ones.