Iran Outranks Israel in Scientific Output

According to Scimago Journal and Country Rank (SJR), the Islamic Republic of Iran has managed to achieve the sixth rank in Asia in terms of scientific output despite international pressure and sanctions.

Iran has surpassed the Israeli regime in the ranking which used to hold a top rank in scientific output over the past two decades due to the generous support it received from the US, the UK, and France, a report by the Persian-language Fars News Agency said.

From 1996 to 2016, by publishing 388,672 scientific articles which were cited 6,960,963 times, the Islamic Republic achieved a relatively high rank (22) in the SJR. This comes as Israel ranked 25th with 320,716 scientific articles and 297,964 citations.

Earlier, the Israeli daily Haaretz had admitted that Iran has turned into a scientific superpower. “Today, Iran has far surpassed Israel in science due to hard efforts made by the Iranian government and scientists.”

For a brief review of Iran’s achievements in various fields of science and technology, check the book “Science and Technology in Iran: A Brief Review”

The articles produced by Iranian scientists in a number of areas including biology, physics, chemistry, economy and business management are far more cited compared with those of Israeli scientists.

Back in 1996, Iran had only 960 scientific articles but the number reached 41,000 over the past two decades.

The progress is made while Iran is under pressure by certain powers in the world and the region.

Scimago Journal Rank (SJR indicator) is a measure of scientific influence of scholarly journals that accounts for both the number of citations received by a journal and the importance or prestige of the journals where such citations come from.

A journal’s SJR is a numeric value indicating the average number of weighted citations received during a selected year per document published in that journal during the previous three years. Higher SJR values are meant to indicate greater journal prestige.