A bibliometric analysis on scientific productions of the institute of environmental research of Tehran university of medical sciences

The bibliometric analysis is the most effective way to study the scientific output and trend of research. The purpose of this study is to analyze the scientific output of the Institute of Environmental Research (IER) at Tehran University of Medical Sciences using bibliometric technique.

All related IER articles that have been indexed in Scopus and WoK were retrieved from the beginning of 2009 till November 23, 2019. The bibliometric data were extracted and analyzed using R software.

The document production follows an increasing exponential trend with a rate of 10% per year. 807 documents were retrieved with an average citations of 19.26 per each document. The documents per author and authors per document were obtained 0.196 and 5.1, respectively. The highest citations to documents was in 2017 (35.5 citations). The most frequent keywords were found “Adsorption”, “Drinking water”, “Air pollution”, “Particulate matter”, “Risk assessment” and “Response surface methodology”. Thus, engineering-based studies are more prominent in the published studies. Health-based studies, including risk assessment studies, accounted for the most area of research. The largest numbers of international research collaboration were recorded with the United States, Switzerland, Canada and India. While, in the national scale, Shahid Beheshti University of Medical Sciences’ collaboration was prominent.

It is still necessary to promote the level of the IER’s international collaborations to raise its regional status. In addition, more attention should be paid to health-based topics like risk assessment studies. These studies need to be given higher priority in the action plan of the IER’s centers and research groups.