An Analysis of the Status of Iranian Chemistry Research based on the Web of Science

The present scientometric study aims to investigate the scholarly productivity and impact of Iranian Chemistry researchers in the Web of Science database. The research method was scientometric. A total of 19456 documents in different sub-disciplines of the Chemistry which specified Iran as their affiliated country and indexed by the Web of Science database were selected as population of the study. The results of the exponential regression test revealed a 18.76 percent growth rate for Iranian publications. The highest number of documents (3310) has been published in 2011. The number of citations and self-citations received by Iranian publications was also studied in this paper. Based on the results, Iranian Chemistry publications in the Web of Science have received 6.418 citations and 0.15 self-citations per document. Moreover, 183760 researchers within their 88266 papers have made 124882 citations to the documents produced by Iranian researchers in the field of Chemistry. The highest number of citations has been received from Chinese, Indian, American, Spanish and Turkish researchers. The results also demonstrated that among Iranian universities and research centers, Islamic Azad University was the most productive university and Razi University of Kermanshah had the most citation impact. Moreover, among all sub-disciplines of the Chemistry, Multidisciplinary Chemistry has had the highest share in scientific publication with 6462 documents. Conversely, the least number of publications has been published in Applied Chemistry with 1533 documents. The results of the study also revealed that researchers from 81 countries all over the world had scientific collaboration with Iranian researchers. Among them, United States, Germany and England have shown the most number of collaboration with Iranian researchers. Finally, Iranian researchers have published their publications in 452 ISI journals.