Spatial analysis of education and science production in Arab countries

The basis of power and life in today's world goes back to the extent of having knowledge. Today, most of the world's orientations are towards the production and development of science and technology, and developed countries are moving from an industrial society to a society called the information society or the scientific community, and the weapon of science has become a strategic weapon in these countries. Today, scientific development is an example of the national authority of the country and a platform for development in all matters. Raising the knowledge of the society in all fields requires scientific development more than ever, and in order to achieve scientific development, the ground for the production of science must be provided. Today, the role of science production and research has gone beyond an increasing factor of well-being and has become the only way to remain effective in life and in the fast-paced world of technology and advancement. Research and production of science is one of the indisputable and basic needs of any society. The study of policies and development programs of industrialized countries shows the fact that these countries are aware of the importance and position of science and technology and have considered these two as the axis of their economic, social, political and cultural development.     The Arab world or Arab countries include 22 Arabic-speaking countries (10 African countries and 12 Asian countries) with a population of 349,870,608 and an area of ​​13,130,695 square kilometers, a region that on the one hand, include the poorest countries in the world (Somalia and Mauritania), and on the other hand includes some of the richest oil-exporting countries in the Persian Gulf. Are social and security, such as international sanctions, internal conflicts, or many economic problems.  Although the lack of continuous and sufficient financial and social support from research institutes is temporary, the main problem is the long hours of teaching and turning professors and experts to the private sector, especially in the fields of medical law, engineering and attracting financial management jobs from the private sector. All of this reduces the potential of researchers.     The production of science means the departure of science from the state of imitation and translation. When scientists come up with new theories about phenomena, they are in fact producing science. (Shariatmadari, 1384: 9) Science and knowledge have always been important parts of the orders and topics of religions, ideologies, cultures and activities. In fact, today science is one of the most important components of a country's power at the international level and causes that country to be able to play a more important role in the development of the world community and have a greater impact on other countries, and thus accelerate achieving goals and objectives. (Alami, 1387)     The post-independence period (1920-1970) was the initial expansion of education services in the Arab world. After independence, the policies of the Arab governments were to promote the training of the local and professional labor force, and to integrate the economy. All groups of society in the whole region and within the scope of "democratization of education" became the main feature of educational policies in the Arab countries.     Research method in the present article is descriptive-analytical and is based on documentary studies and Internet resources prepared. Due to the challenges of time and limited resources, in this research, documentary studies (books, articles, dissertations, plans and published statistics, etc.) have been conducted. Also, using the resources of Internet sites to achieve the latest achievements of studies and research and to get a brief overview of the production of science and educational topics in the Arab world.     In the first step, an extensive study was conducted to identify and extract science and technology indicators. In this study, many analyzes, especially spatial analysis of science and technology indicators used by domestic and international sources, were extracted and used and examined.     Factor analysis of 36 principal components was performed to evaluate the underlying structure for the collected statistical items. Prior to factor analysis, the data were "reduced" to percentile groups to create a size distortion due to the large variety of scales in each data.     Table 1 shows the different types of data:    - Size indicators, such as number of professors, students, researchers, production volume (in number of articles); share of global scientific production; and Gross Expenditure on Research and Development (GERD).    - Proportional indicators that relate the production of science and the number of researchers to the size of the population     Indicators of change, such as the growth rate of scientific production     - Complex indicators based on the General Innovation Index (INSEAD), or R&D Investment Evaluation (Competitiveness Report of the World Economic Forum), as shown in Section 2 above. Their rankings are often used to supplement the lack of available data on these activities.     More about this source textSource text  is required for additional translation information. The research method in this article is descriptive-analytical. In short, what was done in this study was: Achieving the latest achievements of studies and researches on the subject, as well as obtaining the information needed to determine the amount of articles produced by Arabic-speaking countries in prestigious journals in 2019, documentary studies were conducted and references were made to Internet sources. After the necessary rankings, a comparison was made between the population and the amount of article production among students in these countries. Finally, the obtained data were analyzed using GIS (using Arc gis software). The results showed that First, a large population of Arabic-speaking countries are still illiterate, which is much more evident among women. It is about 2%, which indicates the very low production of these countries in scientific production in prestigious journals around the world. In the end, it should be said that the Arabic-speaking countries should sooner or later start implementing reform programs to increase the quality and efficiency of their educational institutions in order to meet the challenges in the production of science. According to the studies conducted in the present study, in which the situation of higher education in Arabic-speaking countries was examined, it was found that the amount of articles submitted by Arabic-speaking countries does not have a suitable position (ranked 31st). If we look at the global ranking of articles in Arabic-speaking countries in general, about 4 countries (about 18% of them), are among the top 50 countries, and 9 countries, (41%), are among the 51 to 100 countries. They are ranked, and 2 countries, (9%), are in the range of 101 to 150, and 7 countries (32%), are in the position of 151 to 200. On the other hand, the number of articles submitted by Arabic-speaking countries is not significant compared to other countries. Foe instance, Egypt, with the best world ranking compared to Iran, is about one third; other Arabic-speaking countries are far more and have a much lower status.     According to the study of the population and the number of students in Arabic-speaking countries, it can be said that the ratio of population to students in the best case is related to Tunisia with a ratio of 34 to 1, and in countries such as Yemen, 11754 to 1, which is a very inappropriate figure.