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Are Iranian scientists recognized as their productivity enhances? A comparison of Iran’s impact to global norms in different subfields of Science Citation Index during 2002–2005

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Abstract

Witnessing a substantial growth rate in its scientific production, Iran is considered as one of the recently rising stars in scientific contribution scene. However, its impact in science progress is widely unknown, especially at global level. Studying Iran’s scholarly publications and recognition in SCI, the present communication tries to clarify the country’s science system performance using regression analyses and then to compare its performance to that of the world, using Relative Citation Rate (RCR) and Relative Subfield Citedness (RW). The results of the regression analyses reveal that although Iran displays considerable weaknesses in its performance, it is increasingly recognized as its outputs grow. According to the RCR values, Iran performed at/above the global level in 21 subfields. However, the RW values show that the country’s performance is above the global level in only two subfields. Although Iran is very far from an ideal situation; these evidences can be considered as heralds of a successful movement towards a wealthy scientific future.

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Notes

  1. http://www.in-cites.com/countries/iran2006.html.

  2. http://www.in-cites.com/countries/iran2006.html.

  3. http://www.in-cites.com/countries/index.html.

  4. As the JCR provides no data at subfield level for year 2002, immediacy indexes of the related journals were used to calculate the citations from 2002 to papers published in year 2002. The numbers of citations to these papers in each year from 2003–2007 were extracted from JCR 2003–2007.

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  1. Department of Library and Information Science, Faculty of Education & Psychology, Shiraz University, Eram Campus, Shiraz, Iran

    Hajar Sotudeh

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  1. Hajar Sotudeh
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Sotudeh, H. Are Iranian scientists recognized as their productivity enhances? A comparison of Iran’s impact to global norms in different subfields of Science Citation Index during 2002–2005. Scientometrics 83, 39–54 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-009-0018-x

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