Urmia Lake Drying up Crisis in the Mirror of Domestic Researches: A Scientometric Study

The drying up of Urmia Lake is one of the main concerns of the academic community, environmentalists and publics, especially the inhabitants of Urmia Lake basin. The drying up of this lake has many economic, social, environmental and health consequences, In this research, all papers on the drying up of Urmia Lake in Persian language which were published in domestic journals were examined and analyzed from the scientometric perspective. So, common tools in scientometrics as well as the data collected from Islamic World Science Citation database were used. Results showed that between 1379 and 1401, a total of 998 researchers have published 1005 papers on the subject of Lake Urmia. Meanwhile, Javad Bahmanesh from Urmia University was the most prolific author with 28 papers (2.79% of all papers). Furthermore, Urmia University with 250 papers and University of Tabriz with 162 papers were the most prolific universities that have published papers on the Urmia Lake topics. This shows that the drying up of Urmia Lake has been one of the most important concerns of Azerbaijani universities on both the western and eastern shores of Urmia Lake. Water Resources Research Journal, which is published by the Iranian water resources association in Persian, has published the highest number of papers in the subject area of Urmia Lake with 39 articles.