Evaluating the Citation Impact of the Papers Published in Iranian Farsi Scientific-Research Journals

We have studied in the present research the citation impact of the papers published in Iranian Farsi scientific-research journals in the three fields of medical sciences, agricultural sciences, and human sciences, which have been indexed in SID citation database. This study used citation analysis. The population under study included all papers with two or more citations in Farsi scientific-research journals in the three fields of medical sciences, agricultural sciences, and human sciences which were published during 2002-2007 and indexed in SID citation database. To choose the papers, purposeful sampling was used. The bibliographic information of each paper as well as that of its citations was extracted from SID database. Also, SPSS software was utilized to analyze the data. Considering the results, citation mean value in the three fields under study was calculated to be 3.08 citations. Additionally, based on the results yielded from inference analyses, there is no significant difference among the three mentioned fields regarding the citation impact. In total, findings of the research showed that the citation rate is very low for the papers published in Iranian Farsi scientific-research journals, such that many of these papers have not received any citation. Therefore, care should be taken when using the citations of these papers in evaluation of the researchers’ scientific impact.Originality/Value: The number of citations received by papers in scientific journals is used as a significant index in evaluating the impact of a country’s publications on scientific community; therefore, the present study makes clear the status of citation impact of the papers published in Iranian Farsi scientific-research journals in the three fields of medical sciences, agricultural sciences, and human sciences.