A Thematic Study of Articles on Rural Geography in Scientific Research Journals of Iran (A Review of Articles Published between 1948 and 2008)

The present article, based on the database of research papers in the field of Geography at the national level, seeks to review and categorize topics ofrural geography. Statistical populations consisted of 2388 articles from 19 Geographic Journal published in Iran during 1948-2008. The subjects of articles were determined based on the curriculums of geography courses and data entry and their processing were conducted in Dot.net database by Asp.net programming language. Also, Sql Server was used to enable article searching. Findings/ The results show that 45.5% of geographical articles werewritten in the years 2003 to 2008 with 57% focusing on human geography out of which 30% were about various topics of rural geography.Conclusion and Suggestion: According to 88 professors of Geography, the mostimportant factor for increased number of articles in recent years has been “its effect on academic upgrading of professors”.