Citations and References to Iranian Scientific Products

One of the most important indicators for examining the qualitative status of science production is based on citation analysis. The basis of this index is the number of citations made to science. Accordingly, various indicators such as article citation, normalized citation, H-index, top papers including hot papers and highly cited articles matter. Studies and analyzes show that Iran scientific activities, along with the growth of science production, due to the growth of the quality of scientific production, especially in recent years has been more than enough. The number of citations is one of the indicators for evaluating the quality of science production, although this indicator alone cannot indicate the quality of science, but in any case it is one of the criteria that is based on the amount of citations or the number of references to scientific products. And now it is the basis for quality evaluation of scientific journals, universities and research institutes and countries. Also, one of the important criteria considered by some international ranking systems. According to statistics extracted from WoS, Iran citation rank has always been increasing in the last 8 years, from 24th in 2012 to 20th in 2015, then 18th in 2018 and finally 16th in 2019. All this shows an upgrade.