Leading Science Producing Institutions in Iran (2008)

This paper aims to investigate the status of scientific publications of leading Iranian institutions (in terms of scientific publications) in the Web of Science (WOS) database in 2008. The data required for this study was collected through bibliometric methods. On this basis, information about the four leading science producing institutions in Iran was retrieved and analyzed based on scientometric indicators and with regard to authority control of the variant names of Institutions in WOS. In 2008 the amount of Iran's scientific publications grew by 49.75% in comparison with 2007. Having produced more than 12% of the scientific publications of Iran in 2008, the University of Tehran (UT) ranked first among Iranian institutions. After UT, Tehran University of Medical Sciences (TUMS), Islamic Azad University (IAU) and Tarbiat Modares University (TMU) ranked second, third, and fourth respectively. In terms of the different indexed affiliation names, only UT authors have indexed their scientific publications in WOS under a unique name. Among branches of the Islamic Azad University, the Arak Branch, after appropriate authority control, collectively has 24 scientific publications. TUMS, TMU and IAU have the highest amount of collaboration with UT authors in their scientific publications. The large number of scientific publications of organizations has an important role in scientific collaboration among them. Iranian universities still don’t use a unique affiliation name for the International Citation Databases.