I summarize research articles of interest to my readers, for example at https://www.ptsdexams.net/disability-exams-research.html .

I usually include the Digital Object Identifier (doi), either by itself, e.g., doi:10.1007/s12207-019-09367-5 or as a link, e.g., https://doi.org/doi:10.1007/s12207-019-09367-5.

I noticed today that a link contained unusual characters (for a doi link), that I learned is URL encoding to a valid ASCII format, specifically %2F instead of a forward slash (/).

I also noticed that if I use the URL without the URL encoding, it still works, although Chrome converted the URL, as did Microsoft Edge.

https://doi.org/10.1007/s12207-019-09349-7 → https://doi.org/10.1007%2Fs12207-019-09349-7

Firefox and Opera did not convert the URL, although either URL worked on those browsers.

It seems to my less-knowledgeable mind that it does not make a difference which URL I use on my website, but I want to ask the experts to make sure. Thus, my question: Should I use URL encoding for doi links, or does it matter?

Notes

(1) I did search for other posts about this topic. The two most similar posts were How to remove %2F from the URL? and How to get rid of crawling errors due to the URL Encoded Slashes (%2F) problem in Apache

(2) Browser versions I used:

Chrome 84.0.4147.125 (Official Build) (64-bit)

Microsoft Edge 84.0.522.59 (Official build) (64-bit)

Firefox 79.0 (64-bit)

Opera 70.0.3728.106