Iran has held the top spot in the region since 2017 in terms of the number of publications included in the WOS index, but five years later, in 2022, it lost that position.
Iran published 78,225 scientific articles in this database in 2022, according to Scopus data. As a result, for the fourth year running, Iran is ranked 15th in the world for scientific publications. According to Scopus data from 2022, Iran leads the region in terms of the quantity of scientific publications.
Iran has consistently ranked first among the nations in the region in terms of the number of scientific publications, according to a review of Scopus data from 2014 to 2022, and has been able to maintain this position.
3,950,305 works in total have been indexed by Scopus. With 1,016,311 publications, China leads the world in this category and accounts for about 25% of all scientific publications. The next four countries—the United States, India, England, and Germany—are also in that order.
The Tehran University of Medical Sciences, which has published more than 6,800 works, has the largest percentage of scientific publications in Iran, according to data from the Scopus index. In total, 10 Iranian universities have produced nearly half of the nation’s scientific publications as of 2022.
Meanwhile, the latest data from the Web of Science in 2022 shows that Iran ranks second among countries in the region after Turkey.
Iran has held the top spot in the region since 2017 in terms of the number of publications included in the WOS index, but five years later, in 2022, it lost that position.
According to a review of the Web of Science index’s rankings over the previous six years, Iran maintained its 17th-place position through 2019. Iran rose two spots to position 15 in 2020, but over the following two years, this position was lost, and in 2022, Iran fell back to position 17.
For the first time ever, Iran’s scientific standing has declined for two straight years based on the number of publications in the Web of Science. Web of Science, Thomson Reuters Journal Citation Reports, Web of Knowledge, and Scopus are examples of international citation indexes.
1,452 scientific journals are published in the nation, according to the Ministry of Science, Research, and Technology’s most recent statistics. According to IRNA, 289 of the aforementioned journals are indexed in the Scopus database, and 67 are indexed in the Web of Science database.
The Leader of the Islamic Revolution, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, has claimed that the West tried to isolate Iran by putting pressure on it, but their efforts had the opposite effect.
He characterised the Iranian nation’s impressive performance as progress under the most intense pressures and economic siege. According to the US, the economic pressures applied to Iran are unprecedented in history. They were true to this, the Leader continued, “despite all their lies.
The comments were made by Ayatollah Khamenei on March 21 during a speech at Imam Reza’s sacred shrine to mark the start of the new Iranian year. The year of “Inflation Control, and Growth in Production” is what he dubbed the Persian New Year.
The Leader emphasised the advancements made in science and technology as well as Iran’s position as one of the top nations in the world in areas like Nano and Biotechnology, health, aerospace, nuclear, defence, infrastructure, medical facilities, and oil refineries. The West’s attempts to isolate Iran in international relations have fallen short, he claimed.
More than 45 scientific and research journals have been indexed by Scopus since President Ebrahim Raisi’s administration took office in August 2021, according to the deputy health minister Younes Panahi.
He added that before the administration took office, 135 publications had been indexed by Scopus, and that number is now 180, indicating an unprecedented growth in the number of publications that are Scopus-indexed. He added that in 2021, medical science researchers from the nation registered 27,800 articles in the Scopus database.
As of September 2022, according to the deputy science minister Peyman Salehi, Scopus had cited 18 of the articles written by Iranian researchers over the previous year as opposed to 101 over the previous 40 years.
The Scopus International Citation Database reports that over an eight-year period (2013–2020), the proportion of Iranian articles with international participation increased significantly by 209 percent, making Iran the leading Islamic nation in terms of science diplomacy.