Study the scientific outputs in the field of Persian Gulf in Scopus during 1996-2015

Findings from studies on science assessment and evaluation are the most important tools for planning and policy-making in each country; therefore, the aim of this study was to investigate the scientific output in the field of Persian Gulf in Scopus during 1996-2015.
Material and This descriptive survey study was performed using scientometrics method. The study population was the indexed articles in Scopus with keyword of Persian Gulf from 1996 to 2015. Data were analyzed using analytical tools in Scopus and SPSS 21.
Findings: The results have shown that all 2667 documents written by 84 countries have been published in 160 journals with 27 different fields. The average growth rate of annual outputs was 22.5% in the world, 17.5% in the Middle East and 39.2% in Iran. Moreover, 23.8% of the documents have one author and documents with three or two authors are in the next ranks. Most scientific outputs are related to the field of "medicine".
In the last 20 years, we are faced with significant growth in scientific outputs in the field of Persian Gulf. Although Iran has the most scientific outputs in this field, the qualitative evaluation of scientific outputs published by this country via indices of "the average number of citations of articles" and "h-index" has indicated their low effectiveness, which should be paid attention.