وضعیت حضور پژوهشگران ایرانی در فهرست دانشمندان دو درصد برتر جهان از سال 2020 تا 2025

Purpose: Each year, Iranian universities publish lists of researchers identified as belonging to the top one percent and two percent of scientists, and these lists receive considerable attention in science and technology news outlets as well as within the research community. In some universities, these individuals are formally recognized and rewarded. This situation raises questions for other researchers regarding the publication-related characteristics that lead to inclusion in the top one percent or two percent lists. Likewise, policymakers and research administrators may be interested in understanding how the publication profiles of the country’s top scientists have evolved over time and what changes they have undergone. In response to these questions, the present study was designed and represents one of the first investigations to analyze the publication characteristics of Iranian researchers included in the global top two percent scientists list.
Methodology: The present study is an applied scientometric study and is descriptive–analytical in nature. First, the datasets related to top two percent researchers published in the Elsevier Data Repository for the years 2020 to 2025 were downloaded. In the next step, data related to Iranian researchers were extracted by limiting the country field to Iran (IRN) for both single-year and career-long researcher groups. The retrieved files were then imported into SPSS software and analyzed using appropriate descriptive and inferential statistical analyses.
Findings: The research findings indicate that from 2020 to 2025, the number of Iranian researchers in the top two percent increased by factors of 1.77 and 1.19 at the career-long and single-year levels, respectively. The minimum research age of Iranian researchers included in the list of top researchers is 16.9 years at the single-year level and 21.3 years at the career-long level. The findings also show a seven-percent decreasing trend in the rate of self-citation among single-year and career-long researchers during the years under review. Examination of selected key indicators used in calculating the C-score shows that researchers included in the career-long list generally perform better on these indicators. Specifically, the average h-index—a combined quantitative and qualitative metric is more than twice as high for career-long top researchers compared to single-year top researchers. Furthermore, career-long researchers have published a higher number of papers as first authors, last authors, and single authors than their single-year counterparts. The number of top Iranian researchers in the fields of humanities and social sciences, and social sciences, is lower than in other subject areas. At the career-long and single-year levels, engineering (with an average share of 24.5% of top researchers per year) and clinical medicine (with an average share of 28.1% of top researchers per year) account for the largest numbers of top researchers, respectively. Based on the findings, among career-long researchers there is a weak correlation (approximately 0.1) between research age and the C-score. Moreover, except for the rankings of single-year researchers in 2024 and 2025, the differences in the C-score, H-index, and researchers’ rankings with and without considering self-citation are statistically significant.
Conclusions: The likelihood of early-career researchers in Iran with fewer than ten years of academic experience being included in the top two percent scientists list is very low. Since the foundational indicators of this ranking system are citation-based, researchers in Iran need to devote sustained effort to increasing the citation impact of their publications in order to accumulate the required number of citations within a shorter time frame. This challenge is particularly faced in the social sciences, humanities, and arts in Iran, where the number of indexed journals and, consequently, citation exchange is more limited than in the natural sciences, engineering, and medical fields. Universities in Iran seeking to increase the representation of their affiliated researchers in top scientist lists can play an active role by strengthening faculty awareness and skills related to citation-enhancing strategies, encouraging and supporting greater international publication activity—especially among scholars in the humanities and arts—facilitating the indexing of domestic Iranian journals in reputable international citation databases, and promoting informed authorship practices that take into account different authorship positions such as single authorship, first authorship, and last authorship. On the other hand, universities in Iran should actively invest in training, encouragement, and incentive mechanisms for faculty members in the social sciences, humanities, and arts to publish more of their research in international journals indexed in reputable citation indexes, such as Web of Science and Scopus.