A Review of Scientific Production of Iranian Surgeon's Community in the ISI Database

Introduction & In recent years high ranking officials of Iran have emphasized more and more on scientometric studies and scientific productivity in journals inside and outside of the country. In this regard, promotion of science production in the article format ISI journals’ level is recommended among faculty members and researchers. Therefore, showing the status of scientific productivity and the publishing of papers in journals of ISI database can give a better picture in this regard to research officials of Iran, so that they can allocate research budget and human resources in a better way. The study tries to give a prefect and reliable view on scientific productivity of Iranian surgery community in the format of articles. The data of this study has been collected from three sub databases of the ISI database. Duration of the study was from 1992 to 2014. Entering the keyword of SERGERY in topic search of ISI database and limiting it to Iran, the retrieved items were analyzed by the analysis engine of the database, and then the data were further analyzed by the EXCEL software. Our findings shows that from 1992 until 2014 totally 2909 articles have been published by Iranian surgery researchers in journals indexed in ISI journals. This data also revealed that more than 60% of all productions have been made in the five recent years and that the scientific productivity of researchers in this field in these 5 years is more than the previous 30 years. From the viewpoint of the most active higher education institute in Iran, it was found out that Tehran University of Medical Sciences with publishing 725 articles (24.92%) of all scientific productivity in this area, stands at the top level first. From the viewpoint of international collaboration, our findings show that up to 2009 only 150 articles were published with international collaboration while during the last 5 years 545 articles have been published with international collaborators. All the articles with international collaborations in the years under study were 695, while out of these 695 articles 311 articles were published with American researchers. It is obvious that the fast growth of scientific productivity of Iranian surgery community could be clearly observed and the fast growth in this area of research could be taken into consideration for other areas of medical research. It was found out that international scientific collaboration in the last 5 years have tremendously increased in this research area and this international collaboration can bring new ideas and experiences to the country, and therefore cause professional and scientific growth of researchers in Iran.