Analysis of the Factors Influencing Citations in Systematic Reviews of Medical Research in Iran

Systematic reviews, which are of prime importance in medical research, provide essential information for decision making through integration of evidence-based information.The aim of the present study was to investigate the status of systematic reviews, citation rate and the factors influencing this rate in medical research in Iran.
The present study was an applied research in which scientometric and statistical tests were used. The status of 382 medical systematic reviews of Iran in the Web of Science database were scrutinized and the factors influencing on citations of these articles were examined.
The results of the study showed that about 60% of articles were published from 2013 to 2015. More than 15% of the review articles were publishe under the subject category of Internal, General Medicine. The subject category of Gastroenterology and Hepatology with the average of 17/96 citation from each article was in the first rank. The highest number of citation for an article was 274. There were seven factors influencing citation : the length of the article, the length of the title, the length of the abstract, the number of keywords, the number of authors, the number of references, and the international collaboration. The findings revealed a significant correlation between the collaborating countries, the number of references and the number of citations. However, the relationship between other effective factors was not significant.
The results of this study showed that the highest number of citations is taken from international articles. Therefore, writing articles with international authors is one of the best ways to increase the citation and visibility of the articles.