The Scientific Output of Iran:
Quantity, Quality, and Corruption
Sadra Sadeh
Stanford Iran 2040 Project, Stanford University &
Department of Neuroscience, University College London
Matin Mirramezani
Stanford Iran 2040 Project, Stanford University
Mohsen B. Mesgaran
Stanford Iran 2040 Project, Stanford University &
Department of Plant Sciences, University of California, Davis
Amin Feizpour
Massachusetts General Hospital Wellman Center for Photomedicine &
Harvard Medical School
Pooya Azadi *
Stanford Iran 2040 Project, Stanford University
Working Paper No. 7
February 2019
* Corresponding author
About the Stanford Iran 2040 Project
The Stanford Iran 2040 Project is an academic initiative that serves as a hub for researchers all
around the world—particularly scholars of the Iranian diaspora—to conduct research on
economic and technical matters related to the long-term development of Iran and to evaluate
their possible implications in a global context.
The project encourages quantitative and forward-looking research on a broad array of areas
relating to Iran's economic development. It seeks to envision the future of the country under
plausible scenarios. The project has been co-sponsored by the Hamid and Christina Moghadam
Program in Iranian Studies and the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at
Stanford.
Stanford Iran 2040 Project
Encina Hall West, Room 206
Stanford University
Stanford, CA 94305-6055
www.iranian-studies.stanford.edu/iran2040
Disclaimer
The Stanford Iran 2040 Project is an academic initiative with the sole objective of promoting
scientific collaboration in economic and technical areas related to the long-term sustainable
development of Iran. The project does not advocate or follow any political views or agenda. The
contributors are selected solely based on their research skills; the center is not aware of, and not
responsible for, the political views of the contributors and affiliates. Likewise, contributors and
affiliates are not responsible for the political views of other contributors or affiliates.
Citation and Correspondence
Please cite this working paper as:
S. Sadeh, M. Mirramezani, M. B. Mesgaran, A. Feizpour, P. Azadi, The Scientific Output of Iran:
Quantity, Quality, and Corruption, Working Paper 7, Stanford Iran 2040 Project, Stanford
University, February 2019.
Address correspondence to:
Pooya Azadi, Stanford Iran 2040 Project
pazadi@stanford.edu
Page 1
About the Authors
Sadra Sadeh is a research associate in Neuroscience at the
Faculty of Life Sciences at University College London and a
contributor to the Stanford Iran 2040 Project. Before that, he was
a researcher at Imperial College London. He obtained his PhD from
University of Freiburg in Computational Neuroscience and has a
master’s degree in Philosophy of Science from Sharif University of
Technology and a bachelor’s degree in Electrical Engineering from
University of Tehran.
Matin Mirramezani is a student of economics at Stanford and a
contributor to the Stanford Iran 2040 Project. His research
interests include public policy, development economics, and
political economy. He is looking for innovative ways to approach
research and policymaking. Previously, he developed an
application to gather and analyze public opinion data at scale to
inform policy and business decisions.
Mohsen B. Mesgaran is an assistant professor of plant sciences at
UC Davis. He is also co-leading research on agriculture and food at
the Stanford Iran 2040 Project. Previously, he worked on
population dynamics and climate niche modeling of plant species
at the University of Melbourne for several years. Using statistical
and mechanistic models, he has been studying temporal and
spatial dynamics of agro-ecosystems.
Amin Feizpour is a research fellow at the Massachusetts General
Hospital Wellman Center for Photomedicine and the Harvard
Medical School where his field of research is microscopy and
medical imaging. He received his PhD degree in physical chemistry
from Boston University. He has also received an MSc degree in
biomedical engineering from Tehran Polytechnic and a BSc
degree in materials science from Shiraz University.
Pooya Azadi is the manager of the Stanford Iran 2040 Project. His
multidisciplinary research interests include energy, environment,
and economics. Particularly, he is interested in the development
of mathematical models to tackle complex problems at different
scales. Before joining Stanford University, he worked as a
researcher at the universities of Oxford, Cambridge, and MIT for
several years.
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Executive Summary
Iran is showing an exceptional increase in the annual number of publications at a rate that leaves
other fast-developing countries like China, South Korea, India, and Turkey in the dust. This raises
the question as to how this surge in publications has happened; whether there has been a tradeoff for quality; and what role government policies have played. Answers to these questions have
implications beyond the specific case of a single country, as Iran represents an extreme example
of the publish-or-perish paradigm that is currently pervasive around the globe.
In order to better understand the trends in Iran’s scientific output, we compiled and analyzed
large datasets of approximately 450,000 papers (publication year, journal, citations, and authors
affiliations), journals information, hyper-prolific authors, retracted papers, publications in
predatory journals, and demographic and economic data. We also performed a first-hand
investigation of agencies that offer writing (fabricated) papers on demand.
We found that the annual number of papers published by Iranian researchers has increased from
about 1,000 papers in 1997 to more than 50,000 papers in 2018, boosting Iran’s contribution to
the world’s annual scientific output from 0.1% to 2.6%. Fundamental sciences comprise 41%,
medicine and health 22%, engineering 22%, agricultural and environmental sciences 10%, and
social sciences 5% of total publications. The quality of publications, as measured by the rank of
journals in which the papers were published, varies significantly across disciplines, with
engineering consistently outperforming other academic fields. However, the quality of
publications does not show a significant adverse change over time in most of the fields, except
in medicine and health. Overall, Iran’s global rank of aggregate citations has consistently
underperformed its rank based on the total number of publications.
The Scientific Output of Iran
Stanford Iran 2040 Project
Iranian-studies.stanford.edu/iran2040
Figure ES-1. Trends in Iran’s scientific output: number of papers and graduate researchers (left), and
global ranks of Iran by annual number of publications and citations (right).
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Internationally co-authored papers constitute about 20% of Iran’s publications. On average,
papers on which the corresponding authors were affiliated with a foreign institution receive
twice as many citations as those whose corresponding authors are affiliated with domestic
research institutions. The share of international collaboration has declined constantly from 1997
until 2012, and only recently started to show a mild upward shift (from 2012 to 2018), presumably
due to the rise in the number of Iranians working at foreign universities. The corresponding
authors on almost 40% of these papers were affiliated with foreign institutions, with half of them
being scholars who were originally from Iran but are now working abroad.
The demographic trends and rapid expansion of university capacities resulted in nearly ten-fold
increase in the number of graduate students over the past two decades, providing large and
inexpensive human resources for research, which partly explains the rising trends in scientific
output. By comparison, new faculty recruitment has failed to keep up with growth in the number
of students, which suggests a plausible reduction in the quality of teaching and research.
Another important contributing factor to the rising trend of papers is the government’s policy in
higher education that make academic promotions and student graduation contingent upon
publication of papers in scientific journals. These policies have created an environment that
lends itself to the most extreme form of the publish-or-perish paradigm. Absent proper training
in the ethics of scientific research and punishment for the plagiarists, these mandates have led
to systemic academic corruption, which manifests itself in Iran’s place among the countries with
the highest rate of plagiarism and retractions. With the academic corruption prevailing even at
the highest levels of government officials, chances for the implementation of stricter measures
and regulations against fraudulent misconduct appear small in the foreseeable future.
In summary, our study highlights that Iran benefits from a window of opportunity for
development by virtue of its large human capital endowment in higher education and research,
both inside and outside the country. However, instead of employing this massive potential in a
way to meaningfully contribute toward the development and prosperity of the nation, the
dominant government policy and the official rhetoric focus on the quantity of publication as
their primary goal. The state’s official discourse misrepresents the size of the nation’s scientific
output as an equivalent to developmental progress. Exaggerated claims in this area play a key
role in public propaganda to appease national pride and to portray a progressive picture of the
state’s policies and performance. Such a superficial emphasis on quantity naturally leads to the
absence of a qualitative approach to scientific research and development and its organic
relationship with the fundamental aspects of society and economy. Pervasive research
corruption—with recent notorious examples just revealing the tip of the iceberg—is a direct
consequence of such a productionist approach to research. If there is no fundamental change in
the current paradigm, the ultimate outcome of such scientific policies will be nothing but a
facade of scientific accomplishment with a disproportionately small contribution to real
scientific progress and an even smaller impact on the welfare of the nation.
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The Scientific Output of Iran: Quantity, Quality, and Corruption
Iran’s high-ranking officials and state media frequently boast about a recent miracle that has
happened in the country’s scientific output (or scientific production, as it is often called). To what
extent are these claims true? Which socioeconomic, political, and demographic factors might
have contributed to this process? Besides quantity, how has the quality of scientific output in
Iran evolved over time? How does Iran perform in this realm compared to other countries? And,
what have been the positive implications and negative side effects of the state’s policies for
boosting research and innovation? This report aims to answer these questions.
Among various aspects of social mobilization in contemporary Iran, changes in demographic
structure and average years of schooling constitute the underlying factors that considerably
affected the country’s human capital for research. Figure 1 illustrates changes in the population
of the nineteen-to-twenty-five age cohort and the number of university students over the past
two decades. Iran’s baby boom began in the 1970s and accelerated in the ensuing years of the
revolution before ending with the fertility decline from around 1985 to 2005 [1]. This created a
massive population bulge which exerted significant pressure on primary and secondary
education in the 1980s and 1990s. In the late 1990s, Iran’s youth bulge was gradually reaching
adulthood and hence ready to enter the job market or continue schooling at the university level.
Widespread changes in parents’ perception of the importance of university-level education for
their children and modest improvements in average household income considerably boosted
the demand for higher education. But until the mid-2000s, universities could accommodate less
than 20% of the young population cohort (nineteen to twenty-five years). However, from around
mid-2000s, the government started to view universities as a means to curb, or at least postpone,
the entrance of the youth bulge into the country's troubled job market. As a result, university
seats expanded to the extent that more than 40% of this age cohort was enrolled at universities
in the recent years.
Expansion of university capacity was accomplished by increasing places in existing institutions
as well as rampant establishment of new nonprofit and for-profit universities. This in turn led to
commodification of higher education in Iran. In the past two decades, college education became
a consumer staple among Iranian households, due to peer pressure to enroll in universities.
However, the gradual contraction in the size of this age cohort is slowly leading to a decrease in
university enrollments, as depicted in Figure 1, leaving many university seats empty.
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Population Size of 19–25 Age Cohort
Stanford Iran 2040 Project
Iranian-studies.stanford.edu/iran2040
Figure 1. Changes in nineteen-to-twenty-five age cohort and number of university students (left axis)
along with the ratio of university students to this cohort (right axis). Note that at any given time, part of
the non-student population age nineteen to twenty-five may already have a university degree.
The resulting sharp rise in university education, combined with the drastic decline in women’s
fertility rate (after the initial baby boom), significantly contributed to social mobilization and
drastically changed the social landscape of Iran. This has accelerated the pace of transition from
a traditional society (large families, low educational attainments) to a more modern one (smaller
families, high educational attainments), to an extent that is hardly matched by any other country
that has undergone similar changes. Interestingly, both factors (increase in university education
and decrease in fertility rate between 1985 and 2005) received synergetic support from official
policies and actions and the popular demand alike. Changing perceptions about the
socioeconomic benefits of having fewer children coincided with the government’s attempts to
lower the fertility rate. The official change in attitude was due to a realization of the dire
consequences of high population growth (upward of 4% per year at the time [2]) on the quality
of governance, particularly in the postwar era when the time had finally arrived for the
revolutionary state to deliver on its generous promises. The outcome of this public-private
cooperation was one of the fastest recorded declines of the total fertility rate in the world: from
about six to two births per woman in a mere two decades.
In addition to these demographic and social changes, government policies on higher education
Page 6
and research have also affected the academic landscape significantly. In particular, these
policies made faculty promotions and student graduations heavily contingent upon publication
of papers in scientific journals (for example, see references [3,4,5]). More generally, in the current
approach of the state to research, publication output seems to be considered equivalent to
scientific and technological advancement, regardless of its quality and its organic role in
economy and society. Publication per se has therefore been treated as an end in itself. The
heightened pressure for publication can damage the quality and credibility of the science, giving
rise to poor, irreproducible studies resulting from fraudulent or sloppy conduct. It also creates a
delusion of “progress”—a fantasy of scientific accomplishments with very little real contribution
to the body of scientific knowledge or to improvement in people’s welfare. In a broader view,
Iran’s publication bubble fits into a wider range of sociopolitical behavior that is commonly
referred to as modernity without development.
To evaluate the quantity as well as quality of scientific production in Iran, we analyze large
datasets obtained from different sources to shed light on the general picture and trends. In the
rest of this paper, we first provide an overview of the rising trends in the quantity of papers
published by Iranian researchers. We put the results into context by discussing the direct and
indirect implications of the demographic changes of the past decades which have been
amplified by the effects of government research policies and the increasing desire of students
for admission to foreign universities as a ticket for emigration. Further, we quantify the
internationally co-authored papers of the Iranian researchers and determine the extent to which
researchers inside Iran collaborate with the country’s diaspora scholars. We then demonstrate
how the quality of output by Iranian researchers varies across time and fields of study. We also
make a comparative analysis of Iran’s scientific output with other countries. We conclude the
report by discussing the endemic plagiarism and other forms of scientific misconduct in the
country using available information on retracted papers; our first-hand investigative analysis of
the so-called private graduate “research” consulting agencies which offer a wide variety of
services to graduate students, including thesis writing and paper production; and a more
detailed analysis of the output by the country’s hyper-prolific researchers.
Trends in Scientific Output of Iran
We start our analysis by evaluating the quantity of scientific output of Iran in recent years. To
this end, we analyzed all the papers published in the peer-reviewed journals indexed by Scopus,
which is one of the largest databases of peer-reviewed papers [6]. Over the past two decades,
Iranian researchers have published about 437,000 papers (Table 1), which places Iran as the
twenty-first most contributing country to the world’s scientific publication output. Analysis of
temporal changes in Iran’s research output shows that the annual rate of publication has surged
by fiftyfold over the past two decades (Figure 2)—outpacing the global trend in expansion of
scientific publication, which has increased by no more than threefold over the same period.
Page 7
Today, Iran accounts for 2.6% of the world’s scientific output, while two decades ago the
country’s contribution was as low as 0.1%. With this rapid growth rate of publication, Iran leaves
other fast-developing countries like China, South Korea, India, and Turkey in the dust.
Almost one-fifth of Iranian papers include at least one international collaborator. Although the
share of multinational papers has substantially declined, the absolute number has always been
on the rise (Figure 2). The internationally co-authored papers can originate from direct
collaboration between the research groups, a change in the affiliation of one of the co-authors
during the research or publication process (e.g., a master’s degree student starting a doctoral
program abroad), and, to a lesser extent, participation by Iranian researchers in large
multinational research projects. The large wave of emigration by educated young adults over
the past years and their establishment as researchers in foreign universities have certainly
contributed to this trend of international collaborations.
Table 1. Statistical summary of scientific publications by Iranian researchers between 1997 and 2018.
Papers Published by Iranian Researchers
Papers
Citations
Number (k)
Share (%)
Total (k)
Per Paper
437
100
4,400
10.1
Authors exclusively from Iran
350
80
3,150
9.0
With at least one international author
87
20
1,250
14.3
28
6.5
550
19.3
Iranian (diaspora)
14
3.3
253
17.5
Non-Iranian
14
3.2
296
21.1
53
12.2
197
3.7
All papers
International corresponding author
Published in journals hosted in Iran
Internationally co-authored papers have been produced in collaboration with scientists from a
wide range of countries (Figure 3). The United States (with over 20,000) and Canada and the
United Kingdom (each with about 10,000 papers) are the countries with the largest number of
collaborative papers with Iranian researchers. Countries such as Canada, Malaysia, and Australia
overrepresent their expected share of collaboration when judged by their own global share of
publication, perhaps due to the presence of large numbers of highly educated Iranians in these
countries. In contrast, countries such as China and Japan, which are less popular destinations
for emigration among Iranians and hence accommodate a rather small population of Iranian
graduate students, have published fewer than expected collaborative papers with Iranian
scholars (see Table A-1, Appendix A).
Papers with international co-authors receive a disproportional citation share of 25% while
accounting for 17% of total publications. Most notably, the citation rate is highest when the
corresponding author of a paper is part of the Iranian diaspora (17.5 citations per paper) or a
non-Iranian scientist (21.1 citations per paper). In contrast, Scopus-indexed journals hosted in
Iran published 12% of the papers but only acquired about 4% of total citations (Table 1).
Page 8
Number of Papers by Iranian Researchers and Share of International Collaboration
Stanford Iran 2040 Project
Iranian-studies.stanford.edu/iran2040
Figure 2. Number of publications by Iranian researchers (left axis) and share of international
collaboration (right axis).
International Collaboration by Iranian Researchers
Stanford Iran 2040 Project
Iranian-studies.stanford.edu/iran2040
Papers
<100
100–1000
1000–5000
5000–10000
10000–20000
>20000
Figure 3. Map of international collaborations by Iranian researchers indicated by number of collaborative
papers published between 1997 and 2018.
Page 9
The quantity and quality of publications also varied depending on the field of research (Figure
4). The largest share of papers was contributed by the fundamental sciences (e.g., chemistry,
physics, biology, and math) (41%), followed by medicine and health (22%), engineering (22%),
agricultural, environmental, and veterinary sciences (10%), and social sciences (5%). We also
calculated the weighted average ranking of journals in which papers of different fields were
published as a proxy for the quality of publication in the respective field (Figure 4). With an
average publication rank of 37, engineering outperforms the other major disciplines in
publication quality, followed by social sciences, fundamental sciences, and agriculture and
environmental science. While the weighted average ranks of journals for the other major fields
have remained almost unchanged over time, the weighted average rank of publications in
medicine and health shows a significant and consistent drop, falling from 38 to 58 in one decade
(from 2004 to 2013).
Quality and Share of Papers Published by Iranian Researchers by Field
Stanford Iran 2040 Project
Iranian-studies.stanford.edu/iran2040
Figure 4. Trends in quality of papers published by Iranian researchers by field of study based on the
normalized ranks of journals (left panel) and the distribution of papers published by Iranian scholars
between 1997 and 2018 among different fields (right panel). A total of 437,000 papers were published over
this period.
We also analyzed how different research institutions contribute to scientific publications. A full
list of universities with the largest contributions to Iran’s scientific output along with the number
of their faculty members and normalized productivity (number of papers per faculty) is provided
in Table B-1, Appendix B. The University of Tehran, Tehran University of Medical Sciences, and
Islamic Azad University (all branches) have had the highest number of publications. However,
other institutions like IPM (Institute for Studies in Theoretical Physics and Mathematics), Sharif
Page 10
University of Technology, and Amirkabir University of Technology showed the highest faculty
productivity, with an average of 7.4, 4.5, and 4.4 papers per faculty, respectively.
Research institutions can also be evaluated in terms of the average number of retractions per
10,000 papers, as a measure of scientific misconduct. Iran’s institutions with the most
publication since 1997 showed a large variance of retraction rates, but on average had a very
high rate of about 13.3 retractions per 10,000 papers (Table A-1). In fact, Iranian publications in
total have been retracted four times the global median, which has put Iran at the top of the list
of countries with the most retractions [7]. The retraction list compiled by the Retractions Watch
Database since 2004 [8] reveals that the discovery of misconduct seems to be mostly the
outcome of sporadic editorial investigations. Since more reputable journals are more proactive
in investigating misconduct, researchers who publish in them, mostly from elite and wellperforming institutions, have disproportionately large rates of misconduct. When a case of
misconduct is identified, it is likely that other papers of the co-authors are also retroactively
investigated. This, in turn, results in a situation in which a few authors are responsible for many
of the retractions from any given institution. Nevertheless, our analysis of retractions reveals
that misconduct is prevalent in all types of institutions in Iran: medical schools, technical
schools, underperforming universities, and even elite universities.
To better evaluate the quality of Iran’s scientific output, we analyzed the degree of self-citation
and share of Iranian papers published in, or cited by, the top journals—a total of 664 journals
which are ranked first and second within each field in Scopus CiteScoreTM journal metrics [9]. For
this analysis we excluded internationally co-authored papers. Analysis of the citations of Iranian
publications indicates that a large portion of the citations are made by the co-authors or other
researchers inside the country, although the country’s rate of self-citation has declined from
54% in 1997 to 40% in 2015 (Figure 5).
Outpacing the average growth rate of papers by a large margin, the share of Iranian papers
among all publications has increased from 0.1% in 1997 to 1.6% in 2016. However, despite the
improvements, Iranian papers only make up 0.5% of papers in the top journals (Figure 5),
meaning that the scientific output of the country is disproportionately published in lower quality
journals. Even more striking is the share of citations that Iranian papers receive from other
papers in top journals, which only accounts for 0.1% of papers referred to by these journals.
Therefore, it can be concluded that Iran’s scientific output has underperformed when it comes
to contributing to the innovative and groundbreaking work that drives different fields.
Page 11
Papers Published by Iranian Researchers (excluding international collaborations)
90
1.8
80
1.6
70
1.4
60
1.2
0.0
1997
2000
2005
2010
2015
1997
2000
2005
0.1%
0.5%
0.1%
0.2
0.4%
10
0.0%
0.4
0.4%
20
0.0%
0.6
0.0%
30
0.1%
0.8
0.0%
40
0
Citations by Top Journals
1.0
0.0%
50
Publications in Top Journals
1.1%
2.0
Iranian-studies.stanford.edu/iran2040
1.6%
World's Total Publications
0.1%
Null
0.0%
International
Share (%)
Origin of Citations (%)
Iran
100
Stanford Iran 2040 Project
2010
2015
Figure 5. Origin of citations of papers published by Iranian researchers (left panel) and shares of these
papers from world’s total scientific output and top journals and share of the citations of these papers by
top journals received in three consecutive years after publication.
In general, the number of citations that a country’s papers receive has a strong correlation with
its annual number of publications, although this typically reveals itself with a lag of a few years.
In order to determine the current standing of Iran on the global research landscape, we analyzed
a two-dimensional matrix of Iran’s rank by aggregate number of papers and aggregate external
citations (which excludes a journal’s self-citation) over time, as presented in Figure 6. If a
country is performing along the 1:1 line, its publication is receiving approximately the overall
average number of citations. A deviation from the 1:1 line can be explained by the quality of
papers and the distribution of publication among different fields.
Iran has improved its ranking in both the number of papers and the number of citations.
However, there has always been a gap between these two ranks with citations ranked as
underperforming. More notably, this gap widened during the 2000s before stabilizing in the early
2010s and more recently improving. It is unclear whether this is a new trend and Iran is going to
rise in terms of the quality of research in the coming years or whether Iranian publications
perform well in terms of external citation just in the initial years (for example, due to excessive
self-citation by authors).
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Ranks of Iran by Number of Papers and External Citations
Stanford Iran 2040 Project
Iranian-studies.stanford.edu/iran2040
Figure 6. Global ranks of Iran by annual
number of (citable) publications and
external citations (i.e., journal self-citations
excluded) between 1997 and 2017 [10].
Causes and Implications
We have thus far demonstrated that the quantity of Iran’s scientific output has skyrocketed in
past decades at an impressive growth rate that is substantially above the world’s average. We
also evaluated trends in the quality of these papers from a number of different aspects and have
shown that the growth in quantity has been achieved at massive costs, the most important of
which is the spread and entrenchment of fraudulent activities and excessive focus on the
publishability of the final output rather than relevance to the needs of the country. In this
section, we seek to explain the underpinning of these developments and the implications of
these trends for the future of Iran. To this end, we examine the role of research expenditure and
human capital stock as the main determinants of research output. The amount of a country’s
spending on research and development would affect its research output and outcome through
various channels: the size of the research community and the members’ qualifications (relative
to other sectors), provision of new and modern research equipment, and access to information
(journals, conference attendance, etc.). Historically, research and development expenditure in
Iran has been fluctuating around 0.5% of gross domestic product (GDP) [11]. In real terms, the
research expenditure of Iran has increased by a modest factor of about three over the past two
decades—whereas the output, as shown earlier, surged by a factor of about fifty. In order to put
the current scientific productivity of Iran in a broader context, we conducted a cross-country
comparison of the correlation between the GDP and the number of scientific publications in
absolute and per capita terms. Iran’s performance in both measures is currently about double
the expected values based on the average performance of other countries (Figure 7).
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GDP and Number of Published Papers
Stanford Iran 2040 Project
Iranian-studies.stanford.edu/iran2040
Figure 7. The relationship between GDP and number of papers published in 2017 in absolute (top panel)
and per capita (bottom panel) terms [12,13]. Note that horizontal axes are on log scale.
Page 14
Having shown that the role of research and development expenditure cannot explain the trend
of scientific production in Iran, we next focus on human factors as the main driver for the surge
in publications. We hypothesized that, given the demographic trends of the country, the increase
in the size of the young population and a concomitant rapid expansion of higher education has
increased the size of the “effective productive population” of the country in research. Our
analysis in fact revealed a massive recent increase in the number of active students in higher
education (including master’s, PhD, and MD students; see Figure 8). This trend is very similar to
the pattern of increase in the number of scientific publications (as shown before in Figure 2),
hence arguing for human capital as the main contributor to the influx of academic papers.
The increase in human capital for research can be seen as a lagged consequence of the
population boom of the 1980s. In the decade leading up to the mid-1980s, Iran’s population grew
dramatically at an annual rate of about 4%. As a result, Iran has seen a massive growth in its
youth population over the past two decades. This was accompanied by the expansion of
university capacity. The high demand for higher education, combined with short-term and shortsighted policies of the state to defer the problem of unemployment, led to the mushrooming of
universities. A notable example was the Islamic Azad University, which was established in 1982
but underwent a massive expansion a few decades later to accommodate the high demand for
higher education. Unlike public schools and universities, Islamic Azad University was not free of
charge (although run by government officials). This gave economic justification to the expansion
of its branches all over the country which marked a new phase of commodification of higher
education in Iran.
Despite this massive increase in the number of university “seats,” the quality of higher education
has not increased proportionately. One indicator showing this disproportionate expansion very
clearly is the number of faculty per student. New faculty recruitment has failed to keep up with
the growth in the number of students, resulting in a significant drop in faculty-to-student ratio
from 18% in 2005 to less than 8% in 2018 (Figure 8). This massive reduction to less than half
indicates that, although the universities have expanded their “seats” to accommodate more
students, they lack the proper educational “capacity” to instruct them. An increase in the
number of students and university seats without a proportionate investment in the
infrastructure of higher education and research is a recipe for reduction in quality.
From the presented analysis several important conclusions can be drawn: first, Iran has an
extremely high paper-per-dollar ratio and, second, the recent surge has been primarily
attributable to the size and productivity of the research community rather than a boost in its
research spending. From this argument it can be further inferred that, given the country’s
expected fiscal pressure in the short- to mid-term, which implies that the research expenditure
is unlikely to rise in the foreseeable future, any change in the future scientific output (both in
terms of quantity and quality) will continue to be mainly driven by the size and productivity of
the research community. A forecast of the effective population of postgraduate students should,
Page 15
for example, provide a rough estimate of the trend of publications in the future.
While the increase in the number of postgraduate students who need to publish for various
reasons (see below) can be considered as the main driver of the unconventional surge in the
quantity of Iran’s scientific production, lack of proper policies and prudent plans at the
governance level can be identified as the main culprit for the lack of quality and the resulting
corruption in research. As discussed before, government has failed to invest proportionally in
the enhancement of higher education, as for example evidenced by the decline in faculty-tostudent ratio. More generally, the policies mainly focus on the physical expansion of universities
and higher education rather than creating fundamental capacity and ensuring quality. This is
evident in the discourse of praising the number of publications without mentioning the impact
or significance of those outputs.
This quantitative mentality has in fact dominated Iran’s major policies on higher education,
including the ones on graduation requirements for master’s and doctoral students and
academic appointment and promotion of professors [3,4,5]. However, the bylaws do not provide
a meaningful way to measure the impact or contribution of a researcher’s work in the real world.
Therefore, when it comes to academic appointments in Iran, the researchers do not have an
incentive for producing substantive research as long as their studies are published in an indexed
journal. As such, growing numbers of papers have only been published in low-ranked journals,
including the majority of domestic indexed journals, with negligible contributions to their
respective fields of study.
Similar quantitative policies govern the incentives of the growing body of graduate students and
thus contribute to the large influx of journal papers. While master’s degree students are
encouraged to have their work submitted to (or even published in) an ISI (Internation Scientific
Indexing) journal, doctoral students are required to have at least one work published in an ISI
indexed journal, with more incentives for any additional publications. Therefore, higher
education policies pertinent to graduation requirements and academic appointments form the
incentives of the bulk of the research community in a predominantly quantitative manner, hence
shaping the trend of quantitative increase in publications without much concern for quality or
the needs of the country.
Page 16
Stanford Iran 2040 Project
Masters, PhD, and MD Students and Faculty-to-Student Ratio in Iran
Ahmadinejad
Rouhani
1000K
20
800K
16
600K
12
400K
8
Faculty to Graduate Student Ratio (%)
MD
PhD
Masters
200K
Faculty to Student Ratio (%)
Number of Graduate Students
Khatami
Iranian-studies.stanford.edu/iran2040
4
0K
0
1996
1998
2000
2002
2004
2006
2008
2010
2012
2014
2016
2018
Figure 8. Number of graduate students (left axis) and ratio of faculty members (assistant, associate, and
full professors) to graduate students.
With publication fever on the rise among the growing body of postgraduate students and
researchers, a black market has inevitably infiltrated academia, giving rise to formation of a
chain of shady businesses practicing a wide array of corrupt activities. Our first-hand
investigation revealed that these agencies offer various types of services that cover a wide
spectrum in terms of legality and ethics of research. For example, a few agencies that we
approached denied outright writing of papers from scratch but rather offered to “extract” a
paper from a thesis that the student provides and to help with other aspects of publication such
as translation of the manuscript, preparation of a cover letter, submission of papers to journals,
and help in responding to reviewers’ comments. Such agencies, therefore, capitalize on the fact
that the inflated graduate and postgraduate education system has failed to equip its students
with the proper knowledge and skills required for scientific work and research.
Beyond “helping” with the research, many agencies in fact openly offered to “manufacture” an
entire paper from scratch. This service is available in virtually any area of research that a
customer demands, without even asking for any relevant data. Particularly disturbing was our
observation that the agencies have formed partnerships with predatory journals and dishonest
editors, which in turn allows them to guarantee acceptance of their papers in periods of time as
short as a week. To solve the issue of impact factor, databases of journal metrics exist that
Page 17
provide fake information (e.g., impact factor) for the (predatory) journals introduced by the
agency. Based on the quotas we received, publishing a paper via these agencies, including the
fees for the agency and the journal, would typically cost about $300 to $600. The emergence and
growth of this academic black market in Iran are largely driven by commoditized academic
research, distorted incentives that have become perverse, and overexploitation of quantitative
metrics that measure quantity rather than the quality and impact of the output. Iran needs to
take major steps to improve the integrity and ethics of science before its achievements in
research productivity become (even more) damaged by the presence and dominance of such
corrupt activities.
In addition to the contribution of the so-called research consulting companies which publicly
offer their paper manufacturing services to graduate students, another suspicious phenomenon
is the publication track record of some hyper-prolific university professors who publish an
unusual number of papers each year. In general, the process of publishing scientific papers
includes several time-consuming steps: developing an idea that is worth publishing, conducting
a literature review, performing experiments and surveys, creating graphs and writing the paper,
then going through the editorial review process (at least once), addressing reviewers’ comments,
and proofreading the paper prior to publication. Other factors, such as the language barrier and
teaching and administrative commitments, are known to be common impediments that hinder
the research productivity of Iranian university professors. Given all these considerations, it is
questionable how some university professors can for example publish twenty-plus papers in a
single year, a phenomenon which we found not all that rare in Iran, vide infra.
We focused on these hyper-prolific researchers in order to obtain a more careful and thorough
analysis of possible corrupt behaviors in academia (a similar approach has been taken before in
[14,15]). This approach could be especially helpful as it narrows down the large list of potential
researchers which can otherwise not be scrutinized in detail, and hence guides the auditing
selection process to those with a higher probability of conducting fraudulent activities. Since
most of these researchers are well-rewarded based on the quantity of their publications (e.g.,
recipients of national and organizational research awards merely on the basis of number of
publications), such an in-depth analysis of their research behavior and investigation of the
quality of their publications can also send a strong signal to the rest of the community in cases
of obvious and commonplace misconduct.
To analyze these selected researchers with an unusual number of publications, we used a simple
audit selection criterion that takes into account the annual number of publications of a
researcher (alternatively, one can use a selection criterion that takes into account the authors’
year-over-year changes). We applied such a filter to the co-authors of all Iranian papers with
minimum threshold parameters set to a total of twenty papers per year (Figure 9). This resulted
in the selection of 441 unique authors from a total pool of over 72,000 researchers. We then
compiled a list of authors of the Iranian papers on Scopus that include a note from the publisher
Page 18
indicating retraction (152 papers with 418 unique authors). A comparison of the above lists of
authors revealed that, on a per author basis, the probability of being the (co-)author of a
retracted paper is about five times higher among the hyper-prolific researchers compared to
randomly selected researchers (Figure 9). It is interesting to note that a large majority of the
hyper-prolific authors who published upward of twenty papers in 2018 (144 researchers)
obtained their PhD (or other latest degree) from Iranian universities.
To gain further insight into the composition and types of these hyper-prolific researchers, we
also performed a qualitative in-depth inspection of their publications (using their publication
records on Scopus and Google Scholar [16]). We found that, on average, 19% and 9% of all the
papers of these authors were published in Iranian and predatory journals, respectively.
Based on an informal review of the papers, citations, and other related information of a few
dozen such individuals, we inferred that these hyper-prolific researchers belong to one of the
following groups. First is a group of distinguished researchers, often at one of the country’s top
universities, with cohesive publication records, a small share of self-citations, and a large
number of external citations from high-quality journals (especially by researchers from
developed countries). Second is a group of academics who concurrently hold important
organizational or political positions. There is a reasonable amount of anecdotal evidence for
lack of a meaningful contribution by these individuals to the many papers on which their names
appear as co-authors while they are serving in office. It does not seem unreasonable to assume
that the favors made by the actual authors are returned by these top-ranked individuals
elsewhere. Third is a group of researchers who publish a large number of dishonest, and often
very poor quality, papers that might entail various forms of misconduct such as data fabrication
and falsification, plagiarism, fake review, and unethical and often reciprocal assignments of coauthorship status with their peers. Further work is needed to analyze these results more
systematically and in more detail. Regardless, with this academic corruption prevailing even at
the highest levels of government officials (for example, see references [17,18]), chances for the
implementation of stricter measures and regulations against fraudulent misconduct appear
small in the foreseeable future.
Page 19
Researchers with 20+ Publications per Year (in Scopus)
Stanford Iran 2040 Project
Iranian-studies.stanford.edu/iran2040
Figure 9. The left figure shows the number of authors whose (non-internationally collaborative)
publications in Scopus was equal or higher than twenty papers in a single year. The pie charts show alma
mater of the 144 hyper-prolific authors of 2018 (top) and the distribution of their papers (bottom)
including those papers that were published prior to 2018.
Despite the abovementioned common malpractices and the mass production of low-quality
papers in the research market, many Iranian researchers are still incentivized by other means to
publish quality research. As instability has grown inside Iran and economic prospects have
become grim, researchers and students in Iran are looking outside the country for new
opportunities. University students are increasingly considering emigration and for this matter
academic publication can help secure university admission and funding outside Iran. Iranian
academics who are not looking for an opportunity to permanently leave also benefit from
research experience abroad—for example, many are interested in sabbatical opportunities
outside Iran. Additionally, many Iranians who find opportunities outside the country will
continue to collaborate with their colleagues back home. As a result, there has been a growing
trend in collaboration with researchers abroad. This growth in the number of internationally coauthored papers has occurred in spite of the state’s paranoiac view on international
collaborations and various forms of sanctions that have restricted Iranian scholars from
accessing equipment and information. Absent these restrictions, the potential for collaboration
could have been enormous, given the huge human capital of research inside Iran and the quality
network of Iranian diaspora scholars in many of the world’s top universities and research
institutes.
Page 20
Concluding Remarks
The state’s productionist approach to scientific publication, with the direct and indirect
implications of demographic and social changes, have collectively resulted in an unrivaled rise
in the quantity of Iran’s scientific output over the past two decades. Not being able to create
enough jobs for the country’s youth bulge, the state has implemented expansionist policies in
higher education which resulted in an increase in the number and capacities of graduate schools
throughout the country. Often expressed in numerical terms, the state uses the country’s
scientific production as an underpinning of its propaganda to depict a developmental picture of
itself. The overemphasis on quantitative measures of scientific productivity has given rise to a
publication bubble with two undesirable consequences: inefficient use of the country’s human
resources and the growth and entrenchment of academic corruption.
Since Iranian researchers are heavily incentivized to publish in (foreign) research journals, often
little to no attention is devoted to the actual intellectual and technological needs of the country.
Instead, they almost solely focus on the publishability of their works. For example, very few
papers (none in some areas) provide a holistic and visionary analysis of some of the formidable
crises facing the country (e.g., water scarcity). Another factor that considerably undermines the
analytical depth and cohesiveness of Iranian papers is the fact that an overwhelming majority of
these papers are written by graduate students with minimal input from professors. Overall, the
effective productivity of research in Iran, contrary to what is frequently claimed by the state, is
too small if one wants to look beyond the numeric measures of output and evaluate outcomes
and impacts.
In addition to creating a delusion of development by inflating a publication bubble, Iran’s
productionist approach to research is primarily responsible for the growth and entrenchment of
various forms of misconduct that are spreading throughout the universities like wildfire. Sadly,
officials seem indifferent even to some of the most obvious forms of fraudulent behavior, such
as those of the so-called graduate student research consulting agencies that, over a mere week
or two, generate fabricated papers and dissertations in virtually any field demanded.
Overlooking punishment for these and other forms of fraudulent activities, Iran currently holds
the top rank of paper retraction rates in the world. If inaction against fraudulent publication
activities persists, it will be likely that some of the credible and honest researchers will also
become tempted to relax their strict research and ethical standards in favor of more publications
in order to remain competitive for career promotions and research funds. New faculty
recruitment can also be dominated by the type of applicants who managed to put together a
paper-publishing machine, or joined an already existing one, during their doctoral educations.
Unless corrective actions are taken, the implications of the prevailing new paradigm of research
will put the country in a vicious cycle that causes the research landscape to deprive itself of
trustworthy research materials and researchers alike.
Page 21
Methodology
The statistics about the publications were extracted from Scopus, which is one of the largest
abstract and citation databases of peer-reviewed journals, currently covering about 71 million
records, 23,700 journals, and 1.4 billion citations [6]. The articles included in the database
encompass a wide range of topics, geographic areas, and languages. The time frame of the
analysis spans from 1997 to 2018 except for the analysis of retracted papers, where papers
published after 2004 are considered. We identified papers published by Iranian researchers by
searching for papers with at least one author who is affiliated with an institution in the country.
Books, book chapters, and conference proceedings were omitted from the analysis by limiting
the search to articles (including those in press) and review papers. In order to find publications
that were produced with international collaboration, we searched for papers that are affiliated
with Iran and at least one other country. We used the correspondence address to determine
whether a paper’s corresponding author is in Iran. We estimated the extent of collaboration
between researchers inside the country with the Iranian diaspora scholars by evaluating
whether the names of foreign-affiliated authors are Persian. We categorized all papers into five
major groups: (1) fundamental sciences (chemistry, physics and astronomy, materials science,
biochemistry, genetics and molecular biology, mathematics, and computer science), (2)
medicine and health (medicine, pharmacology, toxicology and pharmaceutics, immunology and
microbiology, neuroscience, health professions, nursing, and dentistry) (3) engineering (all fields
of engineering, energy, and Earth and planetary sciences), (4) agriculture, environmental science
and veterinary science, and (5) social sciences.
We used CiteScoreTM metrics [9] (which is also a Scopus product) to assess how the quality of
publications by Iranian researchers evolved over time. To this end, we first ranked all journals
within each subfield based on their impact factor (e.g., the engineering field constituted twentyseven subfields such as mechanical engineering, electrical engineering, and bioengineering) and
then normalized their ranks such that the ranks of all journals of a subfield range from 1 to 100
with 1 representing the best journal in the subfield. Then, using these normalized ranks along
with the number of papers published by Iranian researchers in these journals, we calculated the
average rank of the publications for each year and field. In conducting our analysis of
misconduct, we utilized the Retractions Watch Database [8] published by the Center for
Scientific Integrity [19], which compiles a total of nearly 20,000 cases of retracted papers since
2004. We note that the database does not include all cases of retracted papers. But to our
knowledge, it is the largest source of information on this matter. A list of potentially predatory
journals was obtained from references [20,21]. We also made several direct phone calls to some
of the so-called research consulting agencies inquiring about the types of the services they offer
and their associated costs (contact information for such agencies is readily available on the
web). We narrowed down our selection to those which appeared to be most professional.
Page 22
References
1. F. Roudi, P. Azadi, M. Mesgaran, Iran’s Population Dynamics and Demographic Window of
Opportunity, Working Paper 4, Stanford Iran 2040 Project, Stanford University, October 2017.
2. Iran’s Statistical Yearbooks, Iran’s Statistical Center, 1997–2016.
3. A. Taheri, M. Shams Bakhsh, Regulations for the Promotion of Faculty Members: Educational,
Research, and Technology, Iran’s Ministry of Science, Research, and Technology, 2016, (in Farsi).
4. Regulations for Education in PhD Programs, Iran’s Ministry of Science, Research, and Technology,
2016 (in Farsi).
5. Requirements for Quality and Quantity of Publications for Completion of PhD Degree, Amirkabir
University of Technology, 2015 (in Farsi).
6. Scopus Abstract and Citation Database, www.scopus.com, accessed in Dec 2018–Jan 2019.
7. J. Brainard, J. You, Rethinking Retractions, Science, 362, 2018.
8. Retraction Watch Database, http://retractiondatabase.org, accessed January 2019.
9. CiteScore Metrics, https://www.scopus.com/sources, accessed Dec 2018–Jan 2019.
10. SJR: Scientific Journal Rankings, Country Rankings, www.scimagojr.com, accessed in Dec 2018–
Jan 2019.
11. Institute for Research and Planning in Higher Education, irphe.ac.ir, accessed in Dec 2018–Jan
2019.
12. International Monetary Fund, World Economic Outlook, accessed in Dec 2018–Jan 2019.
13. World Bank Open Data, The World Bank Group, https://data.worldbank.org, accessed in Dec
2018–Jan 2019.
14. E. Wager, S. Singhvi, S. Kleinert, Too Much of a Good Thing? An Observational Study of Prolific
Authors. PeerJ, 3, 2015.
15. J. P. Ioannidis, R. Klavans, K. W. Boyack, Thousands of Scientists Publish a Paper Every Five Days,
Nature, 561, 2018.
16. Google Scholar, https://scholar.google.com, accessed in Dec 2018–Jan 2019.
17. D. Butler, Iranian Paper Sparks Sense of Déjà Vu, Nature, 455, 2008.
18. D. Butler, Iranian Ministers in Plagiarism Row, Nature 461, 2009.
19. Retraction Watch, The Center for Scientific Integrity, https://retractionwatch.com/the-center-forscientific-integrity.
20. J. Beall, Beall’s List: Potential, Possible, or Probable Predatory Scholarly Open-Access Publishers
(last updated December 31, 2016).
21. Blacklist Journals, Iran’s Ministry of Science, Research, and Technology, 2018.
Page 23
Appendix A
Table A-1. Ranking of top 20 countries with the highest number of collaborations with Iran and countries
with the most publication overall (excluding Iran).
Rank
Total Papers
Rank
Collaborative Papers with Iran
1
United States
8327026
1
United States
20292
2
China
4427874
2
Canada
10123
3
United Kingdom
2412052
3
United Kingdom
9837
4
Germany
2175772
4
Germany
7435
5
Japan
1958849
5
Malaysia
7275
6
France
1521782
6
Australia
7065
7
Canada
1259550
7
Italy
5769
8
India
1252299
8
France
4879
9
Italy
1237354
9
Turkey
4301
10
Spain
1049979
10
China
4163
11
Australia
1007571
11
Spain
3924
12
South Korea
838972
12
India
3742
13
Russian
821894
13
South Korea
3094
14
Brazil
745033
14
Netherlands
2961
15
Netherlands
714173
15
Sweden
2852
16
Switzerland
526541
16
Switzerland
2722
17
Sweden
493638
17
Japan
2666
18
Poland
489430
18
Belgium
2376
19
Turkey
476948
19
Pakistan
2141
20
Taiwan
473335
20
Poland
2111
Page 24
Appendix B
Table B-1. Number of published papers, faculty members, productivity per faculty, and retraction rate
by research institute.
Research Institute
University of Tehran
Tehran University of Medical Sciences
Islamic Azad University (all branches)
Sharif University of Technology
Amirkabir University of Technology
Tarbiat Modares University
Shahid Beheshti University of Med. Sci.
Iran University of Science and Technology
Shiraz University
Isfahan University of Technology
Ferdowsi University of Mashhad
Shahid Beheshti University
University of Tabriz
Shiraz University of Medical Sciences
Isfahan University of Medical Sciences
K. N. Toosi University of Technology
Mashhad University of Medical Sciences
Tabriz University of Medical Sciences
Iran University of Medical Sciences
University of Isfahan
Payame Noor University
The University of Guilan
Shahid Bahonar University of Kerman
Inst. for Studies in Theor. Phys. & Math.
Razi University
Urmia University
Bu Ali Sina University
Ahvaz Jundishapur Uni.of Med. Sci.
University of Mazandaran
University of Kashan
Baqiyatallah University of Medical Sciences
Shahid Chamran University of Ahvaz
Semnan University
Kharazmi University
Yazd University
Mazandaran University of Medical Sciences
Kerman University of Medical Sciences
Total Papers
1997-2018
Publications
in 2018
Faculty
Paper per
Faculty (2018)
Retraction per
10,000 Papers
48330
43742
38791
25974
25940
24968
20008
19409
16612
15881
15507
14502
14101
12638
12013
10865
10546
10440
10379
9476
9470
7691
7472
7062
6586
6124
6099
5462
5276
5239
5209
5089
4847
4846
4782
4608
4393
5062
4943
4699
2065
2397
2524
3096
1867
1684
1724
1860
1556
1738
1567
1380
1018
1647
1577
1908
1040
1138
954
822
694
738
820
613
851
523
711
671
581
721
479
665
581
638
2345
1518
39819
458
546
724
1266
475
672
482
820
800
743
742
668
324
760
716
742
694
3647
585
645
94
445
482
428
592
352
301
301
579
330
487
498
330
384
2.2
3.3
0.1
4.5
4.4
3.5
2.5
3.9
2.5
3.6
2.3
2.0
2.3
2.1
2.1
3.1
2.2
2.2
2.6
1.5
0.3
1.6
1.3
7.4
1.7
1.7
1.4
1.4
1.5
2.4
2.2
1.0
2.2
1.0
1.3
1.8
1.7
19
10
29
7
5
8
10
21
8
7
10
8
10
6
14
12
14
17
17
9
8
2
14
2
12
39
4
0
2
11
61
11
10
0
5
2
0
Page 25