Quantity or Quality? Comparative assessment of the science production of Iran, Turkey and Malaysia during 1996-2013

Although recent researches have declared the science growth rate and position improvement of Iran in the region of Middle East and Islamic countries, the quality of the science is still lost ring. Due to the lack of study on science quality, the aim of this study was to evaluate and compare the quantity and quality of the science production of Iran vs. Turkey and Malaysia. In this library-based research, the indices of each country (number of documents, number of citations, mean of citations and Hirsch index) were extracted from SCIMago database. Based on the cumulative number of documents and citations, Turkey, Iran and Malaysia are in the first, second and third places, respectively. Iran has been in the first place based on the number of scientific productions and mean of yearly growth rate from 2011. Based on H-index and the number of journals indexed in Scopus, Turkey has been in the first place, Iran and Malaysia have been in the second and third places. Iran, Turkey and Malaysia have been in the first, second and third places, respectively based on Scientific Journal Rankings (SJR). Although the quantity of Iranian science production and its rate are considerable, this amount is not desirable due to the population. Study the Indices of quality determination shows the growth of Iranian production and scientific journals quality versus Turkey.