Iran’s top scientific rank among Islamic countries

TEHRAN – Iran ranks first in terms of citations, second for publications, and fourth in terms of the H index among 57 Islamic countries.

The number of publications and citations of Islamic countries along with the Hirsch Index over the last ten years was examined based on the InCites database, Ahmad Fazelzadeh, head of the Islamic World Science Citation Database (ISC), said.

The h-index was developed by J.E. Hirsch and published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America in 2005, which reflects the productivity of authors based on both publication and citation records.

Iran has published the highest number of publications and received the highest number of citations among Islamic countries.

The Essential Science Indicators (ESI) database has listed 841 Iranian researchers among the top one percent of most cited researchers in the world.Turkey and Saudi Arabia are ranked second and third in terms of the three aforementioned indexes, he said.

He further expressed hope to achieve the first rank in science and technology among Islamic countries, based on the Iran Vision 2026.

In the latest report of the Hirsch Index released by Web of Science, the University of Tehran, with a score of 189, and the Sharif University of Technology, with a score of 179, is among the top universities.

Also, according to the 2022 list of Highly Cited Researchers revealed by Clarivate, 12 Iranian researchers are among the most cited researchers.

In November, the Essential Science Indicators (ESI) database listed 841 Iranian researchers among the top one percent of most cited researchers in the world.

The highest number of researchers were included in the engineering category amounting to 229 scientists, followed by clinical medicine with 140, and the multidisciplinary category with 150 people.

On October 26, Stanford University listed 1,870 Iranian researchers among the top 2 percent of the most-cited scientists in the world, which has grown significantly compared to past years.

Despite U.S. sanctions, the international activities of Iranian scientists have increased year by year, so that more than 35 percent of Iranian articles in Scopus have been multi-national projects, the deputy science minister, Peyman Salehi, has said.

Science diplomacy is the use of scientific collaborations among nations to address common problems and build constructive international partnerships.

In 2021, Iranian scientists published more than 77,000 scientific articles in the Scopus database, ranking 15th worldwide.

The country also ranked 15th and 16th in the world in terms of scientific reference