A Scientometric Assessment of the Medical Universities Performance: Two Decades Analysis from 1998 to 2018

 Given the key role of universities and higher education institutes in thesocial and economic development of countries, it is necessary to evaluate their performance regularly with appropriate methods and measures. Since research and science production are among the essential functions of universities, measurement of scientific outputs is an important part of university performance evaluation. The aim of this study was to rank the Iranian medical universities by scientometric indicators.

 One way to evaluate the scientific outputs is to use one of many scientometricindicators defined over the years for quantitative and qualitative evaluation of the researchers. This approach can also be expanded for evaluation at the university level. In the descriptivesurvey presented in this paper, 152597 scientific articles published by the authors affiliatedwith 50 Iranian medical universities were investigated. The scientific output data extractedfrom the Scopus database of each university were analyzed separately using the cumulativenumber of scientific papers, number of citations, citation impact, h-index, m-parameter,and g-index. The universities were then ranked according to each indicator. This study isan applied research based on the results. The sample number in this study was all scientificoutput of the universities studied.

 Among the studied universities, Tehran University of Medical Science ranked firstin terms of cumulative number of scientific papers, citations, h-index, and g-index, AlborzUniversity of Medical Science ranked the first in terms of m-parameter, and Arak Universityof Medical Sciences ranked the first in terms of citation impact.

 The obtained rankings were compared with the results of Islamic World ScienceCitation Database (ISC) ranking system. This comparison showed that the rankings of Iranian medical universities based on cumulative number of papers, number of citations, and h-index were strongly correlated with the results of ISC ranking system.