A STUDY OF CO-AUTHORSHIP AMONG THE IRANIAN RESEARCHERS IN THE FIELD OF ENGINEERING DURING 1990-2010

Nowadays, we need collaboration and consultation with one another. In research and production of scientific works, we are dependent on the team-working more than ever. In other words, there are proximity relationship between collaboration and production of science. Advancements in science and technology are no longer confined to the scientific advancement of individual nations; and indeed, the focus of many scientific journals is on collaboration and co-authorship, both of which are currently on an upward trend. Interaction among scholars in the scientific fields has been a necessity for a long time. Most of the research process stages are related to the communication activities such as dialogue with other experts, writing and reading articles and letters. The purpose of this study is to examine scientific products trend and, particularly, to investigate co-authorship among the Iranian researches in the field of engineering during 1990 - 2010. The benefit of this type of research is to detect writing patterns in scientific products and determine amount of collaboration and intercommunity among field of engineering researchers. Results suggest that proportion of production with one author is declining and the share of production with the pattern of two and three authors rose during 1990-2010 steadily. Findings shows 92% of productions were co-authored and only 8% of them were single authored publications. In addition, based on the results of data analysis, for most years, the percentage of international co-authorship is less than internal co-authorship, except in 1992 and 1994 which were more. The findings also show that 47 journal titles published more than 100 co-authorship papers in the engineering field and the impact factors of the journals publishing the co-authorship papers has been fluctuating between zero and 13 and most journal titles have a very low impact factor and only 7 titles have relatively good impact factor.