Perspective of Iranian women’s scientific production in high priority fields of science and technology

This study investigates the contribution of Iranian women in high priority fields of science and technology based on their scientific production and citations according to the records of Web of Science (WoS) during 2000–2010. The methodology relies on scientometrics techniques. The statistical population of this study was composed of 7,138 records extracted from WoS in 2,275 of them women had contributed. The gender data of Iranian authors was obtained via the WoS Excel output, author profile in Scopus, browsing the homepage of author’s affiliated organization, searching in internet and sending email to the correspondents of paper. The descriptive results show that women in basic and applied sciences have more cooperation in comparison with technology and the most science products have been done in environmental field. Results show that 99 % of Iranian women research is done as joint publications and the average number of participants is three, four and two respectively. Most of the international cooperation is done with USA scientists and the main Iranian participant organization is Tehran University. The results indicated that there is a significant difference between scientific productivity of Iranian women in eight high priority fields of science and technology but no significant difference between pure and applied fields of science. Also, there is positive, direct and significant relationship between the number of authors and the score of citation to scientific products of women in high priority fields of science and technology.