Iranian Journal of

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  Background and Objectives : In the current age, due to the increasing growth of knowledge and competition therein, evaluation of scientific products by means of scientometric methods has become a very important and necessary subject. Scientometrics, in simple words, is the science of measuring the knowledge. Scientometric indices are divided into three categories: productivity metrics that measure the productivity of the researchers or research groups, impact metrics that assess the quality (or performance) of journals, researchers, or research groups, and hybrid metrics that are used to summarize both productivity and effect metrics in one index. Scientometric studies help policy makers and managers of universities and heads of research centers in allocating budget, creating a balance between the budget and costs, making appointments, and promoting the researchers and institutes, and results in better recognition of weaknesses and strengths of their affiliated groups by evaluation of priorities, perspectives, and capacities. Meanwhile, this new knowledge can help with systematic evaluation and ranking of universities and research centers. This paper provides a review on scientometric concepts and its applications and discussed scientometric indices.

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Background and Objectives: The current research tries to investigate the position of Iran in regional and global research of epidemiology.
Methods: To conduct this applied research, scientometric indicators were utilized. The study population comprised 53300 papers published by different countries during 2011 to 2015 indexed in Scopus database.
Results: The results of the study revealed that Iranian Epidemiology researchers published 1196 international articles, making Iran the 16th country in the world and the first country in the Middle East region. Investigating the publication output of institutions showed that seven out of top ten institutions in the Middle East were from Iran. Iranian publications received 3.9 citations on average, while the mean number of citations for regional and global publications was 5.3 and 7.4, respectively. Moreover, the scientific output of Iranian researchers in epidemiology had a lower quality compared to the region and the world, based on three indicators: citedness rate, percentage of highly cited papers, and field-weighted citation impact.
Conclusion: Despite the notable position of the Islamic Republic of Iran in the quantity of the research output in epidemiology, the quality of these publications is relatively low in comparison with regional and global average.

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