A Decade of Activity of the Medical Journal of Tabriz University of Medical Sciences through Scientometric Method (2010-2019)

Journals are one of the channels of scientific communication among experts in the specialized fields of human knowledge as well as a tools for the rapid and widespread dissemination of new research achievements. It is important for founders of scientific journals to explore if the publications of the journal meet the performance of academic journals interms of subjects and collaboration of resarchers. The aim of this study was to analyze the scientometrics of a decade of activity of the Medical Journal of Tabriz University of Medical Sciences.

The method of this research was scientometric analysis. The statistical population of the study included articles published in Tabriz Medical Journal from 2010 to 2019, which are indexed in the Islamic World Science Citation Database (ISC). We analysed publications in Tabriz Medical Journal from 2010 to 2019. To collect the required data, the title of the journal was searched on the website of the Iranian Science Citation Index in the "Advanced Search" section by filtering the desired years. BibExcel, Ucinet, NetDraw and VOS-Weaver software were used for data analysis.

Seven hundred ninety-four articles written by 1947 authors were published in Tabriz Medical Journal. The authors' names were repeated a total of 3111 times in various articles. The average number of authors for each article was 3.92. The citation effect (average citation per article) was 0/36. Each article included an average of 21.56 citations. 31 of the 794 papers were single-author papers while 763 papers were published as scientific collaborations between two or more researchers. There were four authors in the co-authored template. The largest co-authorship network consisted of 92 authors. 2449 keywords were used to describe 794 articles. These keywords were repeated a total of 3118 times in various articles. The most common keywords included "children", "rat" and "polymorphism" with frequencies of 20, 19 and 17, respectively. Thematic clusters included "quality of life", "type 1 diabetes", "aerobic activity", "antibiotic resistance", "breast cancer", "type 2 diabetes", "cardiovascular disease", "drinking water" and "Stress and depression”.

The results of this study indicated the existence of a good status of scientific collaborations among authors based on the patterns of writing journal articles. All thematic clusters obtained were in compliance with the thematic axes or thematic specializations existing in the journal. The average citation per article was about 0/36 percent; thus, the status of the citation rate for the journal articles was not high enough. The index of journals in international databases has a positive effect on increasing the citation rate of journal articles. Therefore, it is suggested that new measures be taken to increase the visibility and impact factor of the journal.