Drawing the scientific communication network of Iranian researchers with other countries in the field of cancer

This study was conducted with the aim of investigating and drawing the communication network of Iranian researchers with other countries in the field of cancer-related science.

The present study is a type of analytical research in which scientometrics techniques and network analysis have been used. The statistical population of the study includes 18846 articles in the field of cancer, which are indexed by Iranians research in the web of science database.

The flow of science production in the years under review is accompanied by growth. The most amount of production in this field in Iran is related to 2019 with 3755 papers. The total number of joint scientific productions of Iranian researchers with other countries in the field of cancer is 4399 records.  The lowest level of cooperation with other countries in the field of cancer is 18% and the highest level of cooperation is 35%. On average, 23.34% of Iran's scientific productions in the field of cancer have been published in cooperation with other countries. 39,929 authors were active in the production of Iranian science in the investigated field, due to the large number of authors, only authors who had more than 15 articles were entered into the software, based on this, 1002 authors were entered into the used software, and the communication network of authors in this field consisted of It consists of 1002 nodes and 20298 links. Malikzadeh, Hashemi and Sahibkar are the top authors with 234, 188 and 183 articles respectively. The authors' analysis in terms of the number of scientific couples also showed that Malikzadeh, Sahibkar are in the center of this network with 222 and 200 scientific couples, respectively. Mohammadi and Ahmadi, each with 193 and 189 other scientific pairs, are among the top authors in the field of cancer. Tehran University of Medical Sciences (4703), Shahid Beheshti University of Medical Sciences (2631) and Islamic Azad University (2165) are the top three universities in terms of science production in the field of cancer. Tehran University of Medical Sciences (247), Shahid Beheshti University of Medical Sciences (239) and Islamic Azad University (237) are the top three universities in terms of having academic couples. Tehran University of Medical Sciences (6748), Shahid Beheshti University of Medical Sciences (3665) and Islamic Azad University (3010) are the top three universities in terms of the weight of the links formed. Tehran University of Medical Sciences (53543), Shahid Beheshti University of Medical Sciences (23680) and Tabriz University of Medical Sciences (23540) are the top three universities in terms of citations in the field of cancer. In the field of cancer, 117 countries have produced science with Iran, therefore, the network consists of 118 nodes, each node belongs to a country, which has a total of 4373 links, and the countries that have the most participation in the production of this field with Iran are They are located in the center and at a smaller distance from the node of Iran.  Examining the total weight of links showed that Iran (6832), America (2885) and Italy (1288) have more links. Examining the number of joint articles also indicates that the most joint works of Iranian researchers are with the countries of America (1434), Canada (599) and England (469). Studying the citations of joint articles also showed that Iranian researchers have obtained 211,489 citations with their joint authors. Most of the received citations belong to articles that have been made in collaboration with researchers from the United States (30,135), England (13,298) and Canada (11,486). The journals "ASIAN PACIFIC JOURNAL OF CANCER PREVENTION", "INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF CANCER MANAGEMENT" and "JOURNAL OF CELLULAR BIOCHEMISTRY" published 494, 315 and 239 articles, respectively. There is a significant, direct and very strong relationship between the scientific productions of universities with the link weight index and the citation weight, the more the scientific productions of the university in this field, the better position it will have in the scientific network, the more influential it will be and the more attention will be paid to that university. will be in relation to the scientific collaborations of different countries with Iran in the field of cancer, the results showed that there is a significant and direct relationship between the number of scientific collaborations with the link weight and the citation weight in the scientific network.

Despite the upward trend of scientific activities of Iranian researchers in the field of cancer, the share of participation each year is associated with ups and downs, which shows that despite the advice given to cooperation and scientific participation in the country, researchers in this field have not taken cooperation seriously. Therefore, measures should be considered so that researchers in this field tend to research more than one author and cooperate with foreign countries.