How to display digital object identifiers (DOI) in index entries?

Greetings,

First, a little background for those who are not familiar with the DOI:

A Digital Object Identifier (DOI) is a handle used to uniquely identify articles.(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_object_identifier)

Here’s an example of a DOI:

10.1000/182

You can see it in action by going to https://www.doi.org/ and entering this number and see how it points you to the article.

Now, my question is – working on a scientific journal that all its articles have an individual DOI assigned to them- I need to be able to generate an index that displays each article DOI beside the page number, like:

Influenza

     10.1000/182,p21

     10.1000/182,p23

Where Influenza is a term in the index, “10.1000/182” is the article’s DOI and “p21” and “p23” are the page numbers the term “Influenza” appeared.

For saving your time, let me tell you that I already tried:

• Using InDesign built-in Sections as placeholder for DOI – Will not work because they are limited to 8 characters
• Using InDesign built in Chapters in the same fashion mentioned above – They won’t appear in index, as documented by adobe

One solution might be to define a text variable called “DOI” for each article, but I don’t know how to call the variable when generating the index.

Thanks for you guidance in advance,

Kasra