Evaluating the Attitudes of Iranian Sci-entific Journals towards Publishing of Scientometric Research: A Meta-Analysis Approach

This study aims to investigate the scientific studies of Iranian scientometrics researchers from the perspective of the diversity of scientific journals published these works. The purpose of the meta-analysis is to combine the effect size of the studies conducted in Iranian scientific Journals.

The research population consisted of 170 research articles in the field of scientometrics which were based on the criterion of internal validity (quality, year, authors and type of research) in the period of three years from autumn 2013 to summer of 2016. In first step, the assumptions of homogeneity were checked; effect size was interpreted according to Cohen’s model.

The results show that based on the Meta-analysis of the articles, 14 specialized journals and 52 non-specialized journals have been involved in the publication of scientific research. The Journal of Information process and management (0.237) has the largest share of publication among the journals. Health Information Management (0.149) and the International Journal of Information Science and Management (0.096) are in the next ranks. The random effect size of the prevalence of the publication of scientific articles in non-specialized journals at the (P-value=0.013) is 0.448. The evaluation of the standard Cohen model's score shows that the effect size of the non-specialized journals (d = 0.5) is estimated to be moderate.

The findings indicate the heterogeneity of the effect size in specialized journals and homogeneity in the case of non-specialized journals. The tendency to publish articles in non-specialized journals compared to specialized scientific journals is significant. But the tendency of knowledge and information science journals to tend to publish scientometric articles is significantly different.