Information Retrieval in Iran: a Scientometric Study and Scientific Visualization

Nowadays, bibliometrics has been an interdisciplinary field with all scientific fields as its scope. The present study is related to the scientometric study of articles in information retrieval produced in Iran from the beginning of the topic in Persian papers to 2019. This research was an applied research which has been done using scientometric techniques such as citation analysis and co-word analysis. The data required for this research have been extracted from the "Islamic World Science Citation" database. The statistical population was 395 articles in the field of information retrieval, which was analyzed using "BibExcel," "VOSviewer," and " Excel" software packages. Some inconsistencies in author names and keywords have been tried to be unified. There was an increasing trend in published papers and received citations. Highly-cited and most influential authors in the field are well-known in the field. "Rahmatullah Fattahi" is in the first place with 11 articles and 16 citations. 77.72% of the articles have been authored in groups (two or more authors) and the two-authored approach with 154 articles has the most co-authorship approach. Six hundred twenty-six authors participated in writing the articles, which were repeated 923 times in various articles. The largest co-authorship network consists of 27 nodes (authors). "Najla Hariry," "Farideh Osareh," and "Saeed Rezaei Sharifabadi" have the highest score in terms of the centrality of rank, intermediate, and closeness among other researchers, respectively. The keywords "information retrieval," "search engines" and "internet" were the most frequently used keywords in the field of information retrieval. The word pairs of "recall - retrieval accuracy" and "Internet - search engines" were the first and second most frequent pairs of co-occurring-word pairs, respectively. Thematic clustering of articles in this field indicates the existence of eight subject clusters: "search, processing and evaluation information," "Storage and retrieval in information systems," "information behavior," "indexing," "information management and Scientometrics," "search engines," "precision and recall" and "information literacy." Co-authorship network showed that authors in the field tended to author with collaborating each other. Considerable items on information retrival have been published in Persian The acceptance of the co-authorship approach in the production of scientific works in information retrieval indicates the willingness of authors to write co-authored research. However, considering that 54.9% of the authors of this study did not receive the H index, the authors should make more efforts to produce quality articles. The largest cluster of this research is the "search, processing and evaluation information" cluster, which indicates the importance of this issue in information retrieval, and the smallest cluster is the "information literacy" cluster, which needs further research in this research field. The study helps authors identify hot topics and highly-considered subjects in information retrieval and provide a pattern for conducting scientometric analyses in similar fields.