Abstract
Background and Objectives: Most of the budget and revenues of each country are spent on research and development processes in order to achieve scientific progress. But the success of each country in achieving this goal is not simply measurable. Evaluation of scientific achievements is based on two main pillars of quantity and quality. The purpose of this study is to investigate the status of citation competition of Iranian researchers' articles in national journals and identify Iranian core journals in the three groups of citation core journals, publishing core journals and Matthew core journals.
Methodology: The present study was a citation analysis one. The sample was consists of scientific articles of the top five universities in Iran. The sample size includes 49328 articles that have been published in 6658 journals. Since the data of this research is taken from Scopus citation database, instead of using the impact factor index, the "journal cite score" is used to show the journal citation impact. The cite score of each journal shows the average number of citations per article over a three-year period for each journal, so it can be used as the expected value for all articles in that journal. For this purpose, in this study, to calculate the number of citations expected for each journal. In this study, core journals were divided into three groups. The first group is Publishing Core Magazines (PCJ), the second group is Citation Core Magazines (CCJ) and the third group is Matthew Core Magazines (MCJ); These are journals that contain half of Iran's articles, journals that contain half of the citations received by Iran, and journals that contain half of Matthew's citations (either positive or negative) in Iran.
Findings: Researchers in the study sample have published in a total of 6658 journals, which includes a total of 49328 articles. With the condition of publishing at least ten articles from Iran in the five years under review for each journal, 994 journals remained as a collection of national journals in Iran. The number of journals in the collection of national journals of Iran (994 journal titles) is only 15% of the total journals (6658 journal titles) that Iranian researchers have selected to publish the article during the five years of study. It is noteworthy that this small percentage of journals, more than half of the articles (55.64%) and up to 70% of the total citations. This information indicates the importance of these journals and the concentration of a large number of articles and citations in a small group of journals. Among the core journals, Matthew Negative Nuclear Magazines is the largest group, accounting for 193 journals and nearly 20% of the total INJS journals. After that, the group of publishing core journals (182 journals) and citation core journals (107 journals) had the largest number of journals, respectively. Matthew Core Negative Magazines, on the other hand, have the lowest number of citations in the period under review, despite having the highest number of journals. This indicates that there are a large number of journals in the collection of national journals of Iran that have not had a proper visibility for Iranian articles. But the positive group of Matthew Core Magazines, which is the smallest group of Core Magazines, despite the very small number of magazines (only 14 titles), but accounted for approximately 11% of the total citations. The main feature of these magazines is that they have been able to occupy half of the citations of Matthew in Iranian magazines.
Discussion: A review of the collections of core journals showed that more than half of the journals do not belong to any of the core groups. On the other hand, in this study, it was found that Matthew core positive journals, the journals that contain half of the citation performance of Iranian articles, are only 14 titles. Perhaps by adopting better publishing strategies and offering advice to Iranian scientists, the number of these journals can be increased. Recently, Iran has always had brilliant rankings in number of articles, so that sometimes it has even surpassed the global growth rate. However, a review of the core journals shows that these journals have not performed well in obtaining citations and credibility, and a large group of them are in the group of negative Matthew core journals (49 titles). This shows that the increase in quantity and number of articles does not necessarily lead to an increase in citation and scientific credibility. Therefore, it is better to choose solutions to increase the visibility of scientific works so that in parallel with increasing the number of articles, appropriate recognition can be received. In general, it seems that the adoption of appropriate research and publishing strategies, as well as the selection of a strong and credible journal, is necessary to improve the citation performance of Iranian articles in the field of scientific competition. Obviously, this does not happen overnight and requires the design and implementation of appropriate short-term and long-term scientific development programs. Ideally, a country magazine collection should be the most reputable collection. However, for countries with poor scientific infrastructure, this may in itself be detrimental; because the acceptance process and, consequently, the quantity of their products affects. Therefore, such systems can, as a suitable alternative, seek to find a set with more visible chances (Sotoudeh, 2011).