Quarter-century of geography of Iran in the mirror of Journal of Geographical Research

Publishing geographical journals which is most often carried out by universities and research institutions and by the private sector in the country has an important role in providing scientific achievements and shows the status of the geographical society of the country. It is also one the evaluation tools for the status of articles, authors and how they are being indexed in the citation databases. This study aims to assess the status of Geographical Research Quarterly on the eve of releasing the 100th issue of the journal. The study is descriptive - comparative which is based on investigating the numbers 1 to 100 of articles published in the Journal during 1986-2011. The study was conducted on 812 articles published during this time in the journal. The results indicate that, the average number of articles published in an issue has been 8.7 and it has a decreasing trend. From 812 articles published in the journal 94.2% were written and 5.8% were translated; recently the publication of translated articles has reached zero. In terms of subject, 48.9% of articles were related to Human Geography, 40% to physiography and 11.1% of articles has marginal titles and topics. In terms of author participation, 65.5% of the published articles had one author, 24.4% two authors and 10.1% had more than two. It should be noted that in recent years the percentage of articles with more than one author has been increasing. In terms of index position in the citation databases based on statistics released by the Islamic World Science Citation Center (ISC), Geographical Research Quarterly has been the most successful geographical journals of the country in 2006 and 2007 considering the citation and impact factor.