The State of Co-Authorship in the Iranian Articles Published in the ISI Journals and it's Influence on Their Citation Rate

The present article aims to investigate the state of coauthorship in the Iranian articles published in ISI journals and its influence on their impact factor, or citation rate. Using scientometrics method and citation analysis, about 23497 Iranian articles published in ISI journal within the period of 1989 – 2005 were examined. Articles’ bibliographic data were extracted from Web of science (WoS) database. chisquare, U Mann-Whitney and -Kruskal-Wallis tests were used to examine hypothesis. Results show that in about 23357 articles (95/1%) the first writers were from Iran and about 20718 articles (88/2%) were co-authored. Findings also indicated that in 18291 articles (77/8%) co-author came from Iran. After Iran, a low percentage of co-authored articles came respectively from the U.K., Canada and the U.S.A. Survey results show that there is a significant relationship between existence of co-author in articles and citation they gain, and there are significant differences between citation rates (references made) to coauthored articles by the Iranians and other nationals.