Scientific Productions and Authorship Patterns of Top Ten Iranian Scientists

Using bibliographic records from the Social Science Citation Index, Science Citation Index, and Arts & Humanities Index, this paper tries to give a complete view of the characteristics of top ten Iranian authors during 1990-2007 according to their authorship pattern. Findings revealed that during 1990-2007 a total of 2650 articles were written by top ten Iranian authors. Findings showed that M. Shamsipour with 463 articles is the most productive scientist of Iran during the studied period. M. M. Heravi with 365 articles and M. Ganjali with 283 articles appeared in the table at second and third positions, respectively. Findings revealed that overwhelmingly the majority of articles (97/69%) written by Iranian top authors are the result of collaborative works and the authors are highly inclined towards collaborative rather than non-collaborative research. There was a remarkable relationship between co-authorship and number of citations. More-than-three-author articles received the most number of citations. On the other hand, it seems that international collaboration of Iranian top authors is not significant.