Iranian Medical Universities in SCIE: evaluation of address variation

Abstract

Applying different institutional addresses in the scientific production of a same university has underestimated the scientific production of Iranian universities and consequently lowered their position in the international academic rankings for a long time. The present study evaluated the scientific production of Iranian medical universities according to their institutional addresses registered in the papers indexed by Science Citation Index Expanded (SCIE). By conducting a descriptive research we retrieved total SCIE indexed of top Iranian medical universities and their respective hospitals and research centers from the beginning of 1986 to the end of 2007. universities were ranked according to observing a uniformed format for more registered addresses in SCIE. The findings showed unexpected diversity in the institutional affiliation of each university in their SCIE indexed papers. Although ''Tehran University of Medical Sciences'' showed the most variation in registering institutional addresses but ranked first according to observing unification for more addresses in the SCIE indexed papers comparing to the other universities. The problem of applying different institutional affiliations in the scientific production of the universities should be valued enough by the whole scientific community. Observing a uniformed format in registering institutional addresses of Iranian medical universities would affect their scientific credibility and international ranks through representing their real scientific productivity.

Scientometric analysis of the major Iranian medical universities

“…There is good agreement between registered addresses in Scopus TM for studied universities with the results of work of Aminpour et al (2010). The trend of the changes in number of articles published from Iran is in good agreement with previously reported data (Mehrdad et al 2004;Moin et al 2005;Yalpani et al 2005).…”