Descriptive and Citation Analysis of Research Letter of Political Science

Research and examination of scientific journals and the content analysis of their topics has gained significance nowadays. On this basis, we have dealt with descriptive and citation analysis of the articles of Research Letter of Political Science in this research for the first time in Iran. The aim of this research was to examine the condition of published articles in this journal form 2004 to 2012 (28 issues) by using descriptive and citation analysis. The statistical population of this research is the articles of 28 issues (187 articles) of this journal which were completely counted and examined. In this research, several issues were considered including tendency and dispersion of subjects, scientific status of the authors, affiliation of the authors in terms of university and research center, the number of authors, and the amount of citation to different sources. The research method was citation observation and providing primary list. The results showed that the most covered subject was political thought. Also there was a significant difference between male and female participation in this journal. Several categories were considered in order to determine the dispersion of subjects. Examination of categories shows that political thought has the most frequency. Meanwhile some topics were not covered at all in the articles. Also examinations have shown that 23.5 percent of all articles have been written by 8 authors. 62 articles were written by one author, 29 percent by two authors, and 9 percent were written by more than two authors.