The survey on the amount of scientific productions in the field of obstetrics and gynecology before and after the health reform plan, based on the Web of Science database: a sciento-metrics study

The position of each subject area in scientific production can indicate the ability of the scientific performance of that subject field. Since obstetrics and gynecology is one of the most important clinical sciences discipline of medical science, this study aimed to evaluate the scientific production in the field of obstetrics and gynecology before and after the Iran health reform plan.

This study is a scientometrics, time interval in the study was from 2008 to 2017 on Iranian articles based on the indexes of the number of documents, the number of citations received, the number of citations to each article, and the H-index of obstetrics and gynecology field based on the Web of Science database. It Indicators investigated, was extracted separately from the analysis section of the database.

The average citation per article, the number of documents and the number of citations in the 5 years before the health reform plan respectively in the field of obstetrics and gynecology equal to 10.44, 196.6, 1750.6 and after the implementation of the health reform plan, equal to 3.89, 282.6, 1031.4. Also, the level of international collaboration before and after the project is 13.06 and 13.25, respectively. Also in the field of gynecology and obstetrics, Ramezani Tehrani, with 1.91% of all articles was the most reproductive writer, and Tehran University of Medical Sciences, with the highest scientific productions in the field of obstetrics and gynecology by 23.77% of all productions. Finally, the field of obstetrics and gynecology had the highest share of scientific production by 66.88%.

The findings showed that the scientific production of obstetrics and gynecology, in terms of quantity (number of documents), after the health reform plan, has been growing, but the quality (citation, H-index) is decreasing. Also, international collaboration has grown after the health reform plan. The findings also showed that before and after the health reform plan, the most cooperation was with the United States and the rate has been lower with Asian countries.