Impact of Iranian Educated Immigrants in Science Production in Canada

During past decade, there has been a noticeable increase in the number of educated personnel immigrating to developed countries from developing countries. Canada has been one of the developed countries that admits a large number of immigrations from different nations. According to the Citizenship and Immigration of Canada, Iran has been one of the top 10 countries in terms of immigration rate over the past decade. However, it is not fully known how the immigration of Iranian scholars may influence scientific productivity of destination country, however. To fill this gap, in this paper, we have attempted to assess the share of contribution of Iranian authors’ in scientific publications of Canada and reported their educational and occupational backgrounds. Corresponding author affiliations of about 39,500 articles indexed in Scopus (2005-2011) in engineering fields have been extracted and checked if they were of Persian names. A sample of online CVs from Iranian corresponding authors has been used to determine the researchers’ educational and occupational backgrounds. Results showed a constant increase in the proportion of publications with Iranian corresponding authors and Canadian affiliation from 8% in 2005 to 16% in 2011. Moreover, 67% and about 50% of Iranian authors have respectively received their BS and MS degrees from top Iranian universities in engineering and 76% of authors had occupations at organizations or universities abroad (mostly in Canada)