A Study onWhere Iran stands in Academic Research Productivity

As Compared to Other Countries

Abstract

In today’sever-increasingly fast-paced world, where massive scientific breakthroughs take place in every split second, it is crucial to keep in touch with the academic world. In fact, making critical scientific progress across international communities can bring about consistent synergy boosting where every nation stands in research productivity. Moreover, an evaluation of developing policies and plans adopted by industrial countries suggest how they have recognized the significance of science and technology, both constituting the axis of economic, social, political and cultural growth. Undoubtedly, Iran is as well expected to realize the scientific development goals through the national 2025-vision roadmap.Accordingly, concentration on academic production at universities and research institutions is a major requirement in various policies made concerning the consecutive 5-Year Development Plans. The upward trend of knowledge generation rate and the improved Iranian ranking in academic research productivity have been absolutelyremarkable over the last two decades.Relying on the statistics provided by several authentic science centers, this paper intends to evaluate where Iran has been standing in the research community, thereby making a comparison as to how Iran and other nations have so far progressed in academic research productivity.

Keywords: scientific research, academic productivity, Iran

Introduction

Nowadays, every industrial country and most developing countries are making great effort to build on their investment intensity in research projects.Strictly speaking, industrial nations tend to make macro-scale investment in R&D areas in order to sustain current status or farther enhance competitive advantage. Similarly, developing countries have found out there is no choice other than R&D investment so as toachieve actualeconomic growth and systematically resolve sociopolitical issues (Sheikhan Rezazadeh, 2003).

Universities and research institutions are regarded as the fundamental entities involved in R&D production of every nation, since they benefit from the essential building-blocks: research management, scholars and instruments. Furthermore, they play a prominent role in scientific R&D through numerous activities such as outlining the research scopes required by the society, setting out research priorities, undertaking research projects demanded by organizations, training highly talented students for research purposes, supervision over research activities, classification and utilization of research results, etc (Ahmadi Dastjerdi & Anvari, 2004).

In the sense of authoring about the available material in the relevant literature, research has been regarded as critical expurgation of subject matters, delivery of new summary and conclusion, scrutiny and pointing out fresh notes and ultimately paving the road for systematic invention and discovery in certain scientific fields as well as case studies in other fields. Research is an attempt to shift the direction of an intricately unknown, trouble-making status into a more crystal-clear one, in the light of which a solution is proposed to the problem (Shariatmadari, 1998).

Literature review

In today’s academic community where there is a broad range of scientific branches concerning a wide variety of in-depthissues appealing to scholars,research is facing an essential difficulty: limited facilities both in terms of manpower and equipment. Anywhere around the world including Iran, the question remains as to how research subjects should be selected from among enormous piles of material (Habibi, 2006).

Any sophisticated individual would notice the fact that nations, no matter how wealthy, need to make plans proportionate to the available facilities, i.e. sort out the tasks, distinguish the top priorities and then make choices, which eventually constitute the agenda. Once in a while, they ought to asses different options, putting aside those inconsistent with the plan, eliminate the obstacles ahead and review extensively the research courses of actionif necessary for harmonization with rest of the plans (Habibi, 2006).

Along the same way, what becomes highly indispensablethese days concerning the vastness of research scopes is prioritization. Multiplicity of information and diversity of subject matters require us to prioritize each scientific field of study. Separately viewed on its own right, every type of research is valuable uncovering a dark area. The result obtained at the end, however, does not necessarily shed light on the entire road ahead, hardly building on the knowledge comprehensively within a certain subject matter. In order to solve multifaceted problems, it is crucial to devise an all-encompassing plan which can portray the problem from different perspectives. Whether restricted to individual or expanded to collective effort, it is appropriate to rateresearch subjects according to their significance and tackle issues with regard to their respective priorities set out through long-term plansprogressing either from general to specific or vice versa.Moreover, the subject matters can be discussed as cluster or network through alternative strategies (Habibi, 2006).

Given the facts mentioned above, it can be concluded that implementation of policies and harmonized identification of obstacles shall not be easy unless research areas are rated according to importance. Similarly, the establishment of research centers should be counted in the conclusive evaluation of top priorities. In fact, that is the only way the priority of establishing such entities do make sense. An additional noteworthy point is that little measures have so far been taken in research-intensive fields. So long as immediate utilization is recommended in that respect, it should be recognized that accurate, in-depth research can provide the subsequent projects with precious resources in various areas.

The manpower engaged in R&D realm matters as a major quantitative indicator used to depict the research mechanism of any community. A comparison of the Iranian population and that of the world suggest the minimum anticipated contribution of Iran in academic research productivity is one percent. Nevertheless, Iran currently makes up merely 0.22% of the total world contribution. According to the statistics released in 2011, Iran ranks 21 among 150 nations in terms of knowledge generation (Fars News Agency, 2011).

As reported by Sabouri (2008), the globalscientific contributions of Iran, Turkey and Israel in 2008 were 0.82, 1.49, and 0.89 percent, respectively. During the same year, however, social sciences research in Israel was four times greater than that of Iran (512 index versus 36 index).

At the moment, there is a long distance between Iran and other nations in terms of knowledge generation. A comparative evaluation of statistics in different countries suggests that Iran, despite 50% academic research growth in 2008, is still way behind its middle-eastern counterparts. Such gap further widens in social sciences and humanities (Sabouri, 2008).

Background

Having examined for a decade the entire scholarly papers, textbooks and information resourcespublished in Iran, the Committee for Identification of Obstacles to Research and Innovation (IORI) pinpointed seven inhibitive factors concerningmanagement, policy-making and the national research system, barriers to research culture, scholars, non-standard scientific climate, research laws and regulations, research budget and funds, research facilities and utilization of research results (IORI, 2003).

A few of these obstacles were mentioned in Sattar’s paper (1996) as insufficient facilities, low wages and benefits, the poor spirit for joint research (co-authorship) and inaccessibility to information networks.

Moreover, Mozaffarzadeh (1998) recounts the research loopholes in Iran as quick replacement of administrators, inadequate budget, inadequate facilities, non-participation in international communities, non-establishment of databases, inappropriateness of employing world databases, lack of enthusiasm for conducting collective projects and inapplicability of research results. The findings of this study were consistent with those yielded by previous studies.

Additionally, the results obtained by Pariad et al. (2003) revealed the effect of stringent financial regulations and the governing bureaucratic mechanism on how individuals may participate in academic research projects. On the other hand, information and communication insufficiency is counted as a major complexity in research institutions.

In a study done by Baghayee et al. (1999), several research barriers were enumerated by relevant authorities and faculty members at Isfahan University of Medical Sciences, including insecure socioeconomic situation and dissatisfaction of scholars, spiritual persuasion issues, emotional encouragement, job promotion and recognition of their scientific achievement in the society, unclear stature of scholars in the science community, reliance of research programs of academic centers on administrative personal interests which is constantly shifted along with replacements, lack of long-term goals set out in the country’s research system and insufficient research-oriented investment on the part of organizations, banks and R&D industries.

The findings from other studies also indicate that personal obstacles such as disinterest in research and lack of time due to excessive occupation lead to the greatest and smallest limitations, respectively. As for organizational obstacles, moral restrictions in research activity and inadequacy of facilities and equipment were identified respectively as the greatest and smallest barriers (Alamdari & Afshun, 2003).

Finally, the results from another study suggest there are several inhibitive factors including accessibility to research results, low reliability and credit given to research results, the divide between scholars and end-users as well as numerous organizational factors (Hemsley–Brown, 2004).

Where Iran and other nations rank in academic research productivity

The significant role of scientific research in national developmenthas been progressively recognized since the second half of the twentieth century. Well aware of the groundbreaking impact left by R&D,all industrial countries as well as successful developing countries have been making great efforts over the last 50 years to reinforce the various indices of research productivity. In today’s ever-increasingly fast-paced world, where massive scientific breakthroughs take place in every split second, it is crucial to keep in touch with the academic world. In fact, making critical scientific progress across international communities can bring about consistent synergy boosting where every nation stands in research productivity. Aiming to pinpoint where Iran stands in academic research production,this paper evaluates the number of articles produced by top twenty nations around the world published in ISI journals during 2012, 2013 and the first two months of 2014.

The Scopus 2012 statistics suggest there has been dramatic growth in the Iranian knowledge generation rate. By the time this report was released, Iran had ranked 16th in the world and 1st in the Middle-East by producing a total of 21714 scholarly articles. Ahead of Iran in this list stand the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, Japan and a few other countries. Producing a total of 314118 articles, the US ranked first while China, the UK, Germany and Japan took up the lower rungs by 215601, 90794, 83907 and 66973 articles, respectively. In terms of knowledge generation rate over the same time span, France ranked 6th by a total of 58139 articles. The 7th to 10th positions were taken up by India, Canada, Italy and Spain producing 52757, 49347, 48358 and 45290 articles, respectively. Ranking 11thto 16thare Australia (39053 articles), South Korea (38653 articles), the Netherlands, Brazil and Taiwan, the last three of which stand not so far away from the Islamic Republic of Iran expected to bridge the gap of figures by the end of 2012, since the three nations produced only as close to each other as 28910, 28488, and 23514 articles, respectively. Representing Muslim countries, Malaysia, Saudi Arabia and Egypt ranked 27th, 37th and 39th, respectively, producing a total of 10067, 6428 and 6381 articles.

Ranking 20th around the world in 2013, the Iranian knowledge generation rate was indicated by a total of 27663 research documents including articles published in prestigious journals and academic conference papers. As for the same year, the US, China, the UK, Germany, Japan, France, Canada, Italy and Australia were the world top 10 knowledge-generating nations standing ahead of India, South Korea, the Netherlands, Brazil, Swiss, Taiwan, Russia, Turkey and Sweden taking up the 10th to 19th rungs. The 20thplace in ISI academic production ranking can be considered significant for Iran, since there are numerous highly developed countries standing right behind Iran. For instance, Poland, Belgium, Denmark, Scotland, Austria, Portugal, Israel, Singapore, Mexico and Czech Republic took up the lower rungs from 21th down to 30th, respectively.Regarding the knowledge generation rate in 2013 according to the ISI data, there were five top nations collaborating with Iranian scholars for publication of scientific articles, including the US (6072 articles), Canada (6072), the UK (595 articles), Germany (581 articles) and Malaysia (574 articles). The rest of the collaborating nations ranking up to tenth were Australia, Italy, Turkey, France and Spain.

According to the report released in late January 2014 by the PR Office at the Regional Centre for Science and Technology (RICEST) and the Islamic World Science Citation Center (ISC), the total number of Iranian ISI-registered research documents were 25030, which amounted to 25960 having counted the conference papers.

The Iranian knowledge generation rate in ISI journals has grown to a total of 27382 research-related documents, which points to 1328recently published articles. Producing a total of 27388 scholarly documents at the time of writing this material, Iran ranked 20th in the world science production according to ISI databases. Over the first two months in 2014, Iranian scholars and researchers authored 2474 articles excluding the conference papers. Within the same juncture, Iran took up the 16thposition in ISI databases, whereas the US produced 1.27% of the world total scholarly documents, i.e. a total of 36415 research articles over the same two months ranking first in global knowledge generation. Taking up the next rungs were China, the UK, Germany and France producing 21160, 9379, 8205 and 6646 scholarly documents, respectively.Standing on the 6th to 10th places were France, Canada, Italy, Spain and India producing 5841, 5576, 5216 scholarly documents, respectively. The 11th to 15th position were taken up by Australia (4878 documents), South Africa (4354), the Netherlands (3325), Brazil (2821) and Taiwan (2501). Standing right behind the Islamic Republic of Iran at the moment are Swiss, Turkey, Sweden and the Netherlands. Within this time span, there were only 2289 ISI-registered documents from Turkey, a neighboring country.

Conclusions

In today’s ever-increasingly fast-paced world, where massive scientific breakthroughs take place in every split second, it is crucial to keep in touch with the academic world. In fact, making critical scientific progress across international communities can bring about consistent synergy boosting where every nation stands in research productivity. Over the 10-year period spanning from January 1996 to September 2006, Iran produced a total of 21661 scholarly documents, ranking 42th in the world. The Iranian academic research production has accelerated over recent years. According to the ISI statistics, the number of academic articles authored by Iranian scholars grew from 26 documents in 1989 to a total of 9061 documents in 2007. By the end of January 2014, the number of ISI-registered articles from Iran amounted to 25960 including conference papers, excluding which the total count was still at 25030, revealing how Iran has been increasingly influencing the world academic production.

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