IRAN’S BIOMEDICAL SCIENCES’ RESEARCH OUTPUT IN 2003: A BIBLIOGRAPHIC ANALYSIS OF MEDLINE AND EXCERPTA MEDICA DATABASES

Iran has been successful in its agenda to improve its international profile in biomedical sciences’ by constantly increasing the quantity and quality of articles published in peer-reviewed biomedical journals that are indexed by either Medline or Excerpta Medica databases (EMBASE). Any article that is indexed by these two major bibliographic databases can be accessed and cited by a wider range of scientists and clinicians across the globe and would provide more recognition, scientific credentials, and continuous research funding for the scientists involved and/or the departments supporting those researches. Previous studies and anecdotal evidence suggest that biomedical scientific output of Iran originates mainly from research hot spots across the country that have a longer research tradition and better research and development infrastructure. Yet, the complexity around the nature of these research hot spots makes it difficult to judge, which departments or scientists should be given higher scientific credentials. Many factors like type of article, impact factor of the journal in which the article is published, forward citation of the article, and to some extent, the sheer number of articles by an author or from a department seem to be important factors and could be considered in evaluation of the research output.