Iranian scientific outputs in the field of energy and fuel, and their comparison with those of the Middle East countries

Today, the quantitative and qualitative research on the scientific outputs of various fields has been considered in universities and scientific centers. The aim of this study was to evaluate the status of Iran's scientific outputs in the field of energy and fuel and compare it with that of the Middle East countries.
In this applied and scientometric study, the data were collected by advanced searching in the Web of Science. These data were related to the energy and fuel from 1998 to 2017. HistCite and VOSviewer were used to analyze the data and draw the scientific maps, and Excel software was applied for statistical analysis.
The results showed that Iran had 10870 indexed documents in the field of energy and fuel. The highest number of documents was published in 2016. In terms of the number of documents in this field, Iran ranked 13th in the world and first in the Middle East. Moreover, in terms of international cooperation in the world and Middle East, Iran was the most cooperative with the United States and Turkey. The most common keywords used by Iranian researchers were optimization, genetic algorithm and exergy, respectively. Furthermore, by reviewing the topics in the most cited articles of the world, it was found that these articles were more focused on renewable energy while in Iran, more focused on non-renewable energy.
The findings indicated that the Iran’s documents had growing trend in this field. Although Iran has a good position in the Middle East in terms of the number of documents, it has a poor performance in terms of the number of citations and Hirsch index, which should be taken into consideration.