Comparative Study of Scientific and Technological Outputs of the Islamic Republic of Iran and other Members of D8 Countries

The achievements of science and technology in today’s world, considered as base of countries’ development. The aim of this study was to investigate the situation of the Islamic Republic of Iran in terms of science and technology outages over a period of 20 years and compare it with Islamic countries that are members of the D8 group. This applied research performed by descriptive-analytical method with scientometric approach. The research community included the scientific and technological outputs of the Islamic countries of the D8 group, indexed at the Scopus database and the international databases of patent licenses for the period 1997-2017. The findings showed that Iran ranks second among the D8 countries in terms of the number of scientific outputs and citations after Turkey. In terms of technological outputs, Iran ranked second after Egypt, third after Turkey and Malaysia, and fourth after Turkey, Malaysia and Egypt, respectively in three international databases: USPTO, EPO and WIPO. In terms of technological outputs to scientific outputs, Iran did not have a good position among the eight countries and in this respect; it was even behind Pakistan, Bangladesh or Nigeria. In most of the countries studied, there was a positive and significant relationship between the number of scientific outputs and the number of citations, as well as technological outputs. However, the results showed that a large increase in the number of scientific outputs in Iran did not necessarily lead to an appropriate increase. Gives a gap between science and technology in the country.