Visualization of Scientific Products and Journals at the Global level (Casting a Glance at Islamic Republic of Iran)

Scientific production in each country indicates its development and the scientific journals are considered as one of the efficient tools for scientific communication and one of the primary characteristics of a social system development. The present research intends to visualize the distribution of scientific journals and documents in the field of medicine indexed in Scopus database during the years 1996-2012 as well as determining Iran’s position in this field. This is an analytic descriptive study in which all published documents in the field of medicine are investigated via the output of Scopus database during the years 1996-2012. SPSS and Node XL software were used to analyze data and to draw graphs. Findings showed that ten countries produced about 70% of the scientific documents in the field of medicine. Furthermore، just 86 countries had indexed journals in Scopus the majority of which (65%) were published by developed countries. Findings showed that the most cited documents were published by developed countries including US، UK and Canada. Scientific products and journals in the field of medicine have experienced an upward trend in Scopus and this was followed by a rapid increase in recent years. There was a significant relationship between the number of documents and citations.