Analysis and visualization of Iranian scientific activities on thalassemia according to scientometric indicators

Today, scientometrics is the main method of assessing and comparing the scientific publications of countries, universities, scientific institutions, specific subjects and authors. The aim of this study was to evaluate the Iranian scientific outputs on thalassemia based on scientometric indicators. In this scientometric study, the social network analysis was used to investigate the co-authorship, word co-occurrence and collaborative coefficient. The study population included 476 articles on thalassemia, indexed in the Web of Science (WoS) from 2006 to 2016. Excel ،Raver-matrix ،SPSS19، UCINET 6/28، Netdraw 2/141 and VOSviewer were utilized for data analysis based on scientometric indicators. The growth rate (27.94%) suggested that scientific outputs on thalassemia had an increasing trend in the WoS. Mean collaborative coefficient was 0.78, and the findings showed that there was a significant relationship between the number of authors and citations to each paper (p=0.05). The Pearson correlation coefficient was 0.650, indicating a direct and positive relationship among the studied variables. However, the co-authorship network of authors and institutes with density of 0.006 and 0.015 indicated low coherence of researchers' network in the field of thalassemia. In the field of thalassemia, both scientific outputs and scientific cooperation level have increasing trend, but compared to other fields, the collaborative network has no good coherence, and it is a great way to achieve the desired status.