Iranian Artificial Intelligence Research Map Based on Scopus Citation Database (1978-2022)

Due to the importance of artificial intelligence, the increasing growth, and the high penetration rate of this technology in other sciences, the necessity of conducting scientometric studies is fully felt. The literature review on the research topic shows that very few studies have been conducted in this case or with not enough comprehensiveness. Considering rapid and significant progress in this field, it needs to be clarified to reveal the current situation and future trends based on scientometric techniques.To fill this existing gap, the present study seeks to answer the question that how is the scientific map of the published studies in the field of artificial intelligence by Iranian researchers in the Scopus database, and based on this map, what are the noteworthy fields of researchers?

The current research is a quantitative and practical study using scientific methods, including co-word analysis and social network analysis. The research population includes all documents in the field of artificial intelligence with at least one author who is affiliated with an Iranian organization and indexed in the Scopus database from the beginning to January 2022. VOSviewer and Gephi are the software used to analyze data and extract maps. The reason for choosing the Scopus database is that this database contains 70 million research articles reviewed by more than 5000 international publishers (Zhang et. al, 2021), and also the database has relative uniformity in all fields (Batooli et al. 2019).

The results of the analysis show that Iranian researchers have published the most documents in 2021, and also the best position of Iran in the field of artificial intelligence was the 20th rank, which was achieved in 2021. Overall, Iran ranks 31 in thisdatabase and third among Middle Eastern countries after Israel and Turkey.Among the types of published documents, articles with number of 3124 are in the first place and notes are in the last place with a number of two published items.19.9% of the published documents of Iranian papers have not received any citations. The greatest number of published documents have between 1 and 5 citations. The highest number of citations belongs to an article with 824 citations.Also, findings show the most frequent keywords are "artificial intelligence", "algorithm" and "optimization".The network structure of high-frequency keywords with a repetition threshold of at least 15, consists of five clusters. In the first cluster, the keyword"neural network" has the highest link weight. In the next "artificial intelligence", "machine learning" and "learning systems" have the highest link weights and the only word in the fifth cluster is "mathematical model" and keywords are placed in five clusters: “inference and prediction”, “intelligent algorithms”, “diagnosis and learning”, “data analysis”, and “mathematical models”.In the coauthor network of 80 countries collaborating with Iranian writers, the most collaboration is between Iranian and American researchers. This network has classified collaborating countries into eight clusters based on direct relations.

The findings showed that the most frequent keywords are artificial intelligence, algorithm, optimization, and neural network. Optimizing is common between this study and GhaviDel, Nezamdost, & Riahinia's (2020). Also, the neural network is common between the present study and the study of Feng & Law (2021) and the study of Darko et al. (2020).The comparison of the most frequent keywords in Iranian and non-Iranian documents shows that Iranian researchers in choosing their research topics were aligned to the general trend of scientific development in most years, and in some years, they have progressed with a step delay.The results of the cluster analysis show that the studies were divided into five thematic clusters. This is even though the study of GhaviDel, Nezamdost, & Riahinia (2020) identified 12 clusters. Also, the difference between the results of the clustering of the present study and the study of Taherian & Assareh (2012) is that in the present study, clustering was done on the documents published by Iranian researchers, but in that study, the clustering was done on all the published documents in the field of artificial intelligence.According to the findings of the research, at the beginning of 2022, Iran was in the 31st rank.Meanwhile, Iran's rank in the study of FarzinYazdi and RezaeiSharifabadi (2017) in the same Scopus database was 17.Iranian researchers do not observe standard affiliations of education institutes and it leads to inaccuracy in the search results.Also, the results show that the process of Iranian documents has been generally upward. However, this growth rate is lower compared to other countries. In the following research topics, Iranian researchers have been in line with the general direction for most of the years, and in some years they have been one step behind.