European Journal of Molecular & Clinical Medicine

Abstract

Introduction:
Science production is not the only valuable index to reflect a country's growth and progress, nor can the citation alone represent the validity of a work. Hence, to assess the validity of the scientific articles produced, it is necessary to use other metrics and indicators such as in-text citation frequency and text citation potential.The present study aimed at determining the validity of the Iranian articles in the field of pharmacology based on their citation value in the Web of Science database using the in-text frequency and text citation potential.
Methods:
This survey was conducted based on the scientometrics and text citation analysis approach. The research population consisted of Iranian articles in the field of pharmacology published in the 2012 in Web of Science database. The sample consisted of 382 articles cited in the field of pharmacology. They were randomly retrieved and selected among 1698 Iranian articles.The data were analyzed using Excel and Endnote software and Statistics Package for Social Sciences. Data analysis was performed using descriptive and inferential statistics. Frequency and percentage were used to assess the text citation potential. The mean was used to determine the top Iranian authors and articles based on the text citation potential and in-text frequency. To analyze the collected data, the values ​​of each indicator were calculated and Spearman correlation coefficient was used to assess the relationship between the rate of the citation to articles, the text citation potential and the text citation.
Results:
The reviewed articles received 1841 citations. The mean text citation potential was 1.09%, the mean in-text frequency was 1.31% and the mean self-citation in the articles was 0.46. The findings showed that there was a direct and significant relationship between the citation frequency and the in-text frequency as well as between the text frequency and the text citation potential and self-citation, but there was no significant relationship between the citation frequency and the text citation potential. Based on the findings, most of the articles in the field of pharmacology had the lowest citation value.
Conclusions:
Due to different and unequal value of the citations, it is necessary to use qualitative evaluation methods obtained from the evaluated indicators in Iran’s research evaluation system to improve the accuracy in evaluation of the articles. Accordingly, the use of measures such as text citation frequency, text citation potential and the placement of citation is crucial for researchers' scientific evaluation.