Visibility and citedness Study of Iranian English-language Agricultural Journals as Reflected in the Scopus Database

The purpose of this study was to evaluate the international visibility of Iranian agricultural journals published in English language in terms of their received citation.

This research is applied one and has employed citation analysis method. The research has been also done with a descriptive-analytical approach. The research population consists of 33 English-language agricultural journals published in Iran.

By 2016, these journals have produced 7476 articles that 2496 (33.4%) of them have received at least one citation. Approximately half of the citing journals are qualitatively placed in the first and second quarters of the Scimago ranking. The number of authors citing to these journal is 38,322 from 147 countries of which 26.29% are Iranians. On the other hand, 27498 authors from 102 countries have contributed to the compilation of articles in these journals, of which 73.8% are Iranians. According to the findings, structure of editorial staff has no effect on citation rate of these journals.

 The results of this study show that the citation rate of Iranian English language journals in the field of agriculture is comparable with the regional countries. Citing journals have an acceptable quality level, although a significant part of them are Iranian ones. These journals are not well known to international writers, and the editorial staff of the journals are predominantly Iranian, although this does not have much influence on the citation rate of these journals.