32-Year Scientometric analysis of the Medical Journal of the Islamic Republic of Iran

Background: Of scientometric goals are to explore scientific productivity and trend, elicit scientific collaborations and inter/intra and cross disciplinary relations within a realm of study. This is a descriptive scientometric analysis of Medical Journal of the Islamic Republic of Iran (MJIRI) from 1987 to 2018. Methods: The data were collected from 1987 to 2018 including the MJIRI annual publication number, annual growth rate (AGR), annual citation indicators, annual degree of collaboration (DC), the most active universities, and the most co-occurred keywords being used in MJIRI articles. Results: MJIRI has published 2166 articles in the field of health and medicine between 1987 and 2018, over a third of which have been published during the last five years (2014-2018). The highest and lowest AGR were recorded in 2014 (AGR=276.190%) and 2001(AGR=-28.75%), respectively. The journal CiteScore has increased from 0.26 in 2013 to 0.94 in 2018; the SCImago Journal Rank has promoted from 0.123 in 2013 to 0.320 in 2018. The Source Normalized Impact per Paper has enhanced from 0.398 in 2013 to 0.552 in 2018. The overall degree of collaboration of MJIRI articles was 0.89. Also, the most co-occurred keywords pertaining to the specific field of medicine were “Breast cancer”, “Pregnancy”, “Tuberculosis”, and “Hypertension”. Conclusion: The current quantitative evaluation of MJIRI provides a holistic landscape of journal performance for 32 years.