Historiographical Map of Iranian Engineering Scientific Publications during 1939-2011

Bibliometric, and scientometric approaches are used to provide appropriate tools for evaluating scientific products at local, national, and international levels. Iran, the same as other countries, has many universities and research centers in the field of engineering that Iran's most of the scientific products account for the field of engineering. This study is a descriptive approach using scientometric methods. is The present paper mainly focuses on visualizing the structure of the Iranian scientific publications in the field of engineering indexed in Thomson Reuters (ISI) accessible via WoS during 1939-2011. To draw the historiographical map of Iranian scientific outputs in the field of engineering, this study used HistCiteTM software. Two indexes, Local Citation Score and Global Citation Score, were used for the purpose of ranking and visualizing data. The results showed that the published papers of Iranian researchers in the field of engineering showed fluctuation. The proportion of Iran in the engineering outputs constituted 0.65% of total publications and ranked 24 of the world. Five large clusters have been formed on the LCS index. The subject areas of the clusters were in “Thermodynamics and Chemical engineering”, “N-O Explosives, “liquid membranes”, “Liquid–liquid equilibrium”, and “decolorization”. However, three clusters have been formed on the GCS index. The subject areas of the clusters were in “liquid membranes”, “applied chemistry”, and “Liquid–liquid equilibrium”. Zafarani-Moattar and Sadeghi, and Ganji, played an important role in this map.