Macro Study of paper's and author's Growth in Technical and Engineering Journals of Iran

Aim: The main aim of the current study was to commit a macro study on the growth of papers and authors in the technical and engineering journals in Iran.
The study was a descriptive survey with a Scientometrics approach. The research population consisted of 9296 papers published in 332 Iranian technical and engineering journals during 2001 and 2010. The data were selected from ISC and Magiran databases out of their electronic archives by nose counting method.
Findings: Data collected showed that the growth of the both paper and author counts follow two positive exponential functions so that the number of papers published in each year is 1.183 times higher than those published in the earlier year. This growth rate is 1.191 for authors. It was also shown that there was a positive linear relationship between the number of authors and papers, while no significant relationship was seen between the growth of authors and the average number of co-authorship in the studied journals.
The exponential growths of the papers and the authors agree with the earlier studies like Price's one. The growth in the number of authors caused increase in the number of papers but failed to increase the number of authors per paper.