Iranians Scientific Productivity on an International Scale (1998-2007)

Purpose: This paper attempts to evaluate the condition of Iran’s scientific productivity in international journals during the past ten years (1998-2010), and consequently assess the Iran’s international contribution to knowledge in this decade.
Methodology/approach- automatic statistical analysis on the results of information searches of countries and publication years (1998-2010) in the ISI database and the thesauri of the website of the Iranian Research Institute for Scientific Information and Documentation according to the categorization of higher education groups in Iran.
Findings: China, South Korea, India, and Turkey enjoy rapid development in the field of science while Iran, Iraq, the UAE, Kuwait, and Egypt are developing gradually yet increasingly. Most of the scientific productions were written in English, published documents were papers and conference summaries. Iranian scholars have collaborated mostly with American, Canadian, and British German, Australian, and French scholars. Among universities and educational institutions, Tehran University contributed the most amount of collaboration. The Applied Mathematics and Computation Journal has published the largest amount of scientific records of Iranian scholars. The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) has had the most amount of influence in Iran’s scientific productivit. Most of the scientific productivity budget has been used in international research in the field of basic sciences, medicine, and technical and engineering areas. Agriculture, veterinary, human sciences, and arts fields come next with a huge amount of difference in consuming Iran’s international research budget. The most amount of scientific productivity in basic sciences was in the various majors in the field of chemistry pharmacology and pharmacy in the field of medicine chemical engineering in the technical and engineering field, and food industries in agriculture and veterinary field while the least amount was in agricultural economics and natural resources. Some majors in the field of psychology and photography had the most amount of scientific productivity in human sciences and art respectively. Medical library science occupies the 46th rank in the total of 53 fields of medical sciences, and library and information science with 37 papers occupies the 11th rank in the total 52 fields of human sciences.
Conclusion: Iran should thrive more for fast scientific development. Regarding the fact that most Iranian documents published in international journals were papers and conference summaries, more effort is required to publish other types of documents in such journals. The least amount of international scientific research has been conducted in agriculture, veterinary, human sciences, and arts fields in addition to medical library science which is indicative of the fact that more effort is required in this regard. The collaboration of the librarians in international research in library science would definitely highlight the value of this field in the medical sciences. By and large, Iranian librarian scholars should increase their amount of collaboration in international research projects. More effort in producing credible papers to be published in internationally accredited journals would enrich the scientific researches of this field with more credibility and value.