Factors Affecting Continuance in the Scientific Activity of Iranian Authors

The aim of this article is to study factors that affect continuance and gaps or transience in scientific activity of Iranian scholars. Scientific activity here is considered as writing and publishing articles in ISI ranked journals. Email interviews were conducted with a purposive sample of 48 scholars from the fields of biotechnology, psychology, humanities, health policy & services, aerial engineering, behavioral sciences, chemistry, and information science in 2015. The chosen fields were mentioned as priority in the Iranian scientific roadmap. The interviews were the qualitative phase of a mixed-methods study. The scholars were asked about the reasons for transience and suggestions for increasing continuance in article writing. The interviews revealed nine categories of factors causing gaps in the scientific works including personal and family factors, internal and external motivating factors, factors relating to work environment and facilities and the nature of the field, factors relating to publishing process, and finally factors relating to the knowledge of ISI journals. Interdisciplinary differences were found with regard to these factors, and five groups of solutions were suggested by interviewees for improving the continuance in authorship including providing research requirements, motivating researchers, encouraging team work, empowerment or enabling, and helping creativity or idea fostering.