Introduction

Today, evaluating the research performance of people, universities, organizations and on the national, regional and international levels is important for policy makers, authorities and planners in various scientific fields. The results of evaluating scientific and research activities can help policy makers to reduce costs and make better use of human and financial resources in order to optimize and improve social and economical situation of a country. Scientometrics is one of the methods used in evaluating scientific activities (1). Scientometrics is one of the reasons behind continuous flow of knowledge in scientific activities which is directly related to quantitative assessment of knowledge (2, 3).

Given the importance of Scientometrics, various tools have been developed to help such evaluations, the most important of which are indexes and citation databases. Scopus and ISI databases are the most famous of these types of database (in this study the commonly used name of ISI which is the appreciation of Institute for Scientific Information is used in the place of the current, official name of the database which is Thomson Reuters web of science). In recent years and after the possibility of online access to web of science database (4) most universities and scientific institutions worldwide evaluated their scientific production using this database. This led to quantitative evaluation of scientific products to become an important factor when comparing different universities and countries.

In Iran and with the help of these indexes, various studies have been conducted in different scientific fields. Based on a report by Nature magazine, in year 2012 Iran is considered among one of the active countries in scientific production with a total of 20065 articles. However, only 0.44% of the Iranian scientific articles are among the top 1% most cited articles worldwide (5, 6).

Today the number of published articles indexed in various databases and number of citations are among the criteria used in ranking universities (7, 8). Therefore if scientific articles are indexed in various indexes and databases, their visibility and consequently their number of citations will increase (9).

Given the fact that in recent years the number of Iranian the scientific productions related to medicine and Medical Sciencesindexed in ISI database has shown a great increase (10) and due to the role of universities as centers for scientific research and since often science stats as research and educational institutions before being used by other parts of society, it is important to evaluate the quality of scientific activities in universities. Therefore given the long history of Ahvaz Jundishapur University of Medical Sciencesand its place as one of the type one universities in Iran, the evaluation of the scientific productions of this university is of great importance.

A literature review shows that to this date no study as concentrated on citation situation of articles by Ahvaz Jundishapur University of Medical Sciencesand most studies only investigated the general situation of scientific production in this university. Since nowadays the number of citations to an article is one of the criteria for its evaluation or in other words, articles with more citation have better quality, investigating the citation situation of articles published by a university can provide information useful for long-term planning and improving the ranking of the university in national and international level. Therefore this study aims to investigate the citation situation of articles published by Ahvaz Jundishapur University of Medical Sciencesand indexed in WOS database in a 22 year period between years 1990 and 2011. The results of this study can be used to determine the strengths and weaknesses of research policies of this university which in turn can be used to improve its scientific and research situation.

Literature review

Due to the limited number of studies about most cited articles, in this part studies investigating all scientific productions and other similar articles are also investigated.

Hassan Zadeh et.al in a study titled “Investigating the Scientific Production of Iran University of Medical Scienceswith Co-Authorship Network in Web of Science Database till the End of Year 2007” investigated the indexed articles published by this university. This study showed that the largest number of indexed articles was published in year 2006 and that original papers had the highest ratio. Also articles related to surgery were the most numerous while articles in the field of immunology had the heist co-authorship ratio (11).

Dabbaghmanesh et.al in an article titled “Most cited articles Shiraz University of Medical Sciences in ISI database during the years 1990 to 2008” investigated the indexed situation of articles published by Shiraz University. Their findings showed that among total 1633 articles indexed in ISI database during the study period, 175 articles (10.7%) were cited more than 10 times. The most number of citations to a paper was 94 and original papers were cited more than other articles. The least number of citations belonged to review papers which constituted 3.4% of all investigated articles. Also 89.1% of the articles had Iranian authors with Iranian affiliations while 10.9% of the articles were the results of international research activities. Also United States, England and Germany were the countries with the most number of co-authored articles with the target university with 23.1, 19.2 and 11.5% of all international articles respectively (12).

Tabari in his study called “The production of scientific papers by faculty members of Guilan University of Medical Sciences” investigated the scientific production of Guilan University. Among total 879 articles, 77% was published by department of medicine and faculty of internal medicine was the most active faculty of this department with 66% of all the articles. Also the results showed an increasing trend in the number of articles published by all departments of this university although the rate of increase is different in different departments (13).

Shahbodaghi and Shekofteh in a study titled “survey the status of the publication and citation Articles Shahid Beheshti University of Medical Sciences in citation indexes Thomson (ISI) in 1998 to 2007” investigated the articles published by Shahid Beheshti University and indexed in ISI database. Their findings showed that a total of 1421 articles were indexed in the investigated time period. The most number of articles was indexed in year 2007 with 499 and year 2006 with 257 articles. In addition, American Journal of Gastroenterology and Journal of Endourology had published the most number of articles from this university. In addition, from 1421 articles, 1001 articles had Shahid Beheshti University as their first affiliation and then researchers from University of Tehran with 131 articles, from Tarbiat Modares University and Pasteur Institute with 27 articles, Baghiattallah University with 23 articles and researchers from other research institutions with 212 articles had been the first affiliation of the investigated articles (9).

Mobasheri et.al in his paper titled “Output of Science Shahrekord University of Medical Sciences at the database ISI-SCIE by the end of 2011, based on scientometrics indicators” investigated the scientific productions of Shahrekord University. Their results showed that the number of articles by this university indexed in ISI-SCIE database was a total of 142 articles in 89 different journals. In addition, the total number of citations to this university’s articles was 352 with an average of 2.48 citations per article (14).

In his study, Lukenda investigated the influence of the 1991-1995 war on creation of publications in the Medline database in Croatia. He investigated the affect of war on scientific production in several universities and research institutions in various cities. The results showed that despite the negative effects of the war, Croatia showed a good scientific progress in the field of medicine (15).

Adkins and Budd also investigated the scientific productions of United States in the field of librarianship between years 1999 and 2004. Based on their results, Tenopir was the leading manufacturer of knowledge in this field. In addition, the results of this study showed that the most number of citations was to articles by Saracevic and that University of Indiana had published the largest number of articles (16).

A report published in year 2007 by department for innovation, universities and skills (DIUS) titled “UK Government: International Scientific Collaborations on the rise” showed that around 40% of scientific productions of United Kingdom between years 2001 and 2005 is the result of international collaboration. Also the scientific collaboration had increased by 50% compared to the collaboration between years 1996 and 2000. In addition, the results showed that most of these collaborations were with United States, Germany and France and most numerous articles were in the fields of clinical medicine, biology and environmental science (17).

Osareh and Zare in their study investigated the scientific productions of University of Tehran indexed in WOS database between years 1989 and 2009. Their results showed that University of Tehran is the leading university in scientific productions in Iran. In addition, Ganjali from department of chemistry was the most active author. In addition, the growth rate of articles indexed in WOS database was 37.8%. The scientometric map of scientific productions of this university was created using Hysteresis software. The results obtained from this map showed that the main clusters belonged to department of chemistry and institutions of Biochemistry and biophysics (18).

Universities and institutions of higher education are the most important channels of scientific production in a country. Therefore evaluating the activities of universities had always been important to various researchers and policymakers. Investigating similar studies in this field showed that most scientometrics studies on scientific output of universities had investigated the articles indexed in ISI database and used scientometrics tools in order to evaluate the scientific productions of universities. In addition, an important trend in the previous literature included an increase in scientific production and original papers, increase in scientific collaboration and participation of Iranian authors in international collaborations. The current study aims to use the previous studies as groundwork for investigating the most cited articles in the target university and uses the number of citations to evaluate the quality of scientific productions.

Study Method

This descriptive study was carried out in 2013 in Ahvaz Jundishapur University of Medical Science. During the study all articles published by researchers from the target university indexed in ISI database between years 1990 and 2011 were investigated. The reason for selecting year 2011 as the last year of the study period was to provide new articles for at least two years time which creates suitable opportunities for citation to articles. A two year period is also the standard used citation report of journals. The data gathering tool was library method with the help of internet of extraction of articles from ISI Web of Knowledge internet database.

Due to two possible spelling used for “Ahvaz” (Ahvaz and Ahvaz) search was carried out twice. First using the spelling “Ahvaz” the search was carried out for the period between years 1990 and 2011 and a total of 2434 records were returned. After refining, organizing and enhancing the search with 32 terms related to Jundishapur University, a total of 865 records were extracted in this step. Among these numbers 457 articles had not been cited. The same method was used using the spelling “Ahvaz” and a total of 671 record was returned in the initial search and a total of 408 record was extracted after refining, organizing and enhancing the search with 25 terms related to Jundishapur University. By matching the results of two searches, 361 records that were similar to those with the spelling “Ahvaz” were eliminated and a total of 42 records remained. Among these 29 articles had not been cited and were eliminated and the remaining 13 records were added to the 408 records obtained from the previous search.

Findings

the most cited articles of Ahvaz Jundishapur University of Medical Sciencesindexed in WOS database between years 1990 and 2011

Among total 421 articles investigated in this study, 116 articles (56%) had 5 or more citations.

Figure 1: the number of most cited articles of Ahvaz Jundishapur University of Medical Sciencesbased on the number of citations

Based on figure 1, the most number of citations to an article was 88 citations which belonged to an article titled “Simultaneous pre-concentration and determination of copper, nickel, cobalt and lead ions content by flame atomic absorption spectrometry” published in 2005. An article titled “Epidemiological aspects of canine visceral leishmaniosis in the Islamic Republic of Iran” with 67 citations published in 2005 and two articles titled “Friction factors for coniferous trees along rivers” and “Highly selective and sensitive pre-concentration of mercury ion and determination by cold vapor atomic absorption spectroscopy” published in 2000 and 2006 respectively with 63 citations each had the second and third place. Figure 2 shows the increasing trend in number of articles cited more than 5 times and shows that less than 10 articles with more than 5 citations existed in 1990s while the total number of articles increased to 116. In addition, the most number of highly cited articles were published in year 2008 with 18 articles while in years 1994, 1996 and 2001 only 1 article with more than 5 citations was published.

Figure 2: the number of articles cited more than 5 times based on publication year

Type of most cited articles published by Ahvaz Jundishapur University of Medical Sciencesindexed in WOS database between years 1990 and 2011

Another important factor is the type of most cited articles. Table 1 shows that most number of articles cited more than 5 times (108 articles, 93.5%) were original articles and the least number of articles was analytical letter with only 1 article (0.5%).

Table 1: most cited articles of Ahvaz Jundishapur University of Medical Sciencesbased on article type