Sunday, December 25, 2011

Iran's increase in science publications in 2011

by Salman Hameed

This week's Nature has a nice map of top 40 countries in terms of the number of scientific publications. Turkey, Iran, Egypt and Malaysia are on the list. Iran also shows a 20% increase compared to its 2010 publication record - the largest increase amongst the top 40 countries. These numbers are just for 2011, but Iran, Turkey and Egypt have been showing a consistent increase in their science papers over the past 10 years or so.

Here is the map:

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

I'm glad to see Malaysia in the top 40... but it'd be great to see the numbers here normalized by the number of academics/researchers in each country :)

Salman Hameed said...

You have an absolutely valid point. In fact, a normalization with the general population will also be useful...

Aurangzeb said...

Did they say anything about the Journals and Conferences that were included to get these numbers? Some countries are better at gaming bibliometrics than others. :)

Salman Hameed said...

Aurangzeb,

Yes, you are correct about that - and this question was raised at one point about Turkey's publications in biomedical field. I don't have info about the journals that were included in there, but I'm hoping that Nature took that into account and applied some reasonable criterion when coming up with these numbers. I think overall, these numbers look okay as they seem to follow the trends of the past decade or so...

Aurangzeb said...

I have read that Pakistani and Saudi (and possibly other) universities were involved in paper inflation. I do not know much about Turkey's publication record in Biomedical but in case of Iran, the papers that I have seen in my field are generally of high quality.

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