Temporal Analysis of International Collaboration Network of Iranian Researchers in Knowledge Production

Longitudinal study to visualize the evolution of international collaboration network of Iranian researchers in knowledge production.
Using scientometrics and Social Network Analysis (SNA) measures, all internationally co-authored articles by Iranian authors being indexed in Web of Science (WoS) during 1969 to 2012 (36879 articles) were studied.
The share of internationally co-authored papers in total publication of Iranian researchers in WoS was 20.87%. International collaboration of Iranian researchers had an annual growth of 63.06% in average. Iranian researchers have collaborated with colleagues from 179 countries. The United States, Canada, United Kingdom, Germany and Australia as the most five important collaborating partners of Iran had contributed to more than 64% of internationally co-authores papers of Iran. Iranian researchers in Electrical Engineering and Electronics, Materials Science (multidisciplinary) and Applied Mathematics had the highest tendency to carry out research through collaboration with foreign countries.
Evolutionary study of international collaboration network of Iranian
researchers based on WoS data showed that this network was formed in 1969. Growing and shrinking were the only two changes which can be seen in the network during different time windows. Also, studying the structure of network in different time spans revealed that the values of network density has decreased over time.