A review of 10 Years of Scientific Production of Iranian Surgeons Community in the ISI Database (1998-2007)

Introduction & In this article, we use Bibliometric methods to review and compare 10 years of scientific productivity of Iranian surgeon community in the ISI database. The data of this study has been collected from three sub databases of the ISI database. These 3 sub databases are, Science Citation Index (SCI), Social Science Citation Index (SSCI), and Art and Humanities Citation Index (A and HCI). Entering the keyword of SERGERY in topic search of ISI database, the retrieved items were analyzed by the analysis engine of the database, and then the data were further analyzed by the EXCEL software. Our findings showed that 67% of the scientific productivity of Iranian surgeon community has been produced by 10 Iranian universities. In this regard, Tehran University of medical sciences researchers have authored 126 documents which constitute 17.1% of all productions. In second rank is Shiraz University of medical sciences that has produced 81 documents, which consists of 11% of all productions. The most international cooperation of the Iranian surgical researchers has been with the researchers of USA i.e. 59 articles have been co-authored with the help of USA surgery researchers. Concerning journals publishing the research of the Iranian surgeon community, the journal of Translations Proceedings, has published 276 documents, which constitutes 37.3% of all productions in this realm. Our findings also show that topics of Transplantation, Immunology and Clinical Neurology have had the lead in publications. Our search showed that the scientific productivity of Iranian surgeons has been ascending in these years. This study includes the publications which have appeared in the ISI journals. The other researches in this regard have not been covered in this article. Thus, Iranian Surgeons have had more publication activity than those which have appeared in the ISI data base. For better understanding of Iranian surgeon's research activity, it is suggested to have a research in the other databases than that of ISI database.