Citation Analysis of the Journal of Religion and Health of Mazandaran University of Medical Sciences, Mazandaran, Iran, during 2013-2017

Background and Citation analysis of the articles in a journal is a method for the investigation of the validity and authenticity of the scientific articles of a journal. The present research was conducted to analyze the citations of the articles published in the Journal of Religion and Health during 2013-2017 to present the first evaluation of the scientific production of this journal. This cross-sectional study was conducted on 9 issues of the Journal of Religion and Health. A total of 76 articles and 2,490 references were investigated in this study. The collected data were analyzed using descriptive statistics indices, including frequency and frequency percentage, in SPSS software, version 20. The results showed that the most frequent citations (30.2%) were obtained from the information sources published during 2012-2008. In this regard, the Qur'an obtained the fourth citation rank after English articles and Persian resources (i.e., articles and books). The highest rates of author participation were detected in the fields of psychology (14.7%), Islamic education (9.5%), and education (7.8%). Most of the published articles (84.2%) were original research. According to the findings, the inclusion of original research, high rate of articles from other universities, and regular publication are among the advantages of the journal under study. However, the high proportion of the articles related to the fields other than Islamic and medical sciences, low share of short communication papers, and low citation number of the articles published in the journal are among the issues that should be considered in this journal.