Field rankings for Iran

	Field	Papers	Citations	Citations per paper	World citations	% +/-
1	Engineering	8,166	24,703	3.03	4.29	-29
2	Chemistry	13,376	76,506	5.72	10.33	-45
3	Physics	4,135	18,964	4.59	8.62	-47
4	Psychiatry/psychology	9	1,451	5.20	10.45	-50
5	Mathematics	1,912	3,040	1.59	3.24	-51
6	Agricultural sciences	1,322	4,096	3.10	6.54	-53
7	Computer science	1,219	1,859	1.53	3.34	-54
8	Materials science	3,106	8,255	2.66	6.23	-57
9	Pharmacology	1,351	6,480	4.80	11.52	-58
10	Geosciences	1,045	3,416	3.	9.12	-64
11	Economics/business	76	136	1.79	5.52	-68
12	Plant/animal sciences	3,083	5,880	1.91	7.31	-74
13	Immunology	3	1,777	5.43	21.04	-74
14	Neurosciences	700	3,345	4.78	18.62	-74
15	Environment/ecology	869	2,256	2.60	10.36	-75
16	Clinical medicine	6,960	21,515	3.09	12.36	-75
17	Biochemistry	1,502	6,244	4.16	16.67	-75
18	Molecular biology	429	2,471	5.76	25.10	-77
19	Microbiology	424	1,371	3.23	15.	-79
20	Space science	255	662	2.60	13.77	-81

Iran has exhibited remarkable growth in its world share of journal articles over the past decade. It has grown fivefold from 2000 to 2008, from 0.17 per cent to 1.02 per cent. Measures of citation impact for the country markedly lag behind this increase in output. The table above ranks fields for Iran by relative citation impact, that is, citations per paper in a field compared with the world’s citations. The percentage above or below the world average is seen in the column far right. All fields exhibit impact below the world average.

The nation focuses its research on engineering and chemistry, producing about 1.4 per cent of the world’s papers in these fields from 2004 to 2008. As a percentage of the country’s output, they account for 41.35% for the same period. This concentration is reflected in the table’s rankings, which show these disciplines to be Iran’s best in relative-citation terms.

The data presented were extracted from the Essential Science Indicators database of Thomson Reuters. Articles are assigned to a category based on the journals in which they were published and our journal-to-category field-definition scheme. For more information: http://scientific.thomsonreuters.com/products/esi