Illustrating and Analyzing the Comparative Knowledge Map of the Keyword Persian Gulf and the Fake Name Arabian Gulf

Purpose: In the present century, due to national and political tendencies and prejudices, the name of the Persian Gulf, which is derived from the ancient texts of BC, has been distorted by some people in official correspondence and scientific texts with the names of the Arabian Gulf and the Gulf. The main aim of this research is the descriptive analysis of scientific productions with the keywords of the Persian Gulf and the Arabian Gulf (fake name) in the Web of Science dataset during the years 1975-2024.
Methodology: The current research is an applied, descriptive and analytical study using scientometrics methods. The research population consisted of all scientific productions in terms of two keywords of the Persian Gulf and the Arabian Gulf (fake name) indexed in Web of Science dataset during the years 1975-2024. VOSviewer and Bibexcel are the software used to extract data and draw maps and Excel and SPSS software to analyze the data.

Findings: The findings indicate that within the Web of Science document database, by the end of 2024, 7395 documents were indexed using the keyword Persian Gulf and 3987 documents were indexed with the keyword Arabian Gulf. The most significant number of documents was published in 2021 for Persian Gulf and 2020 for Arabian Gulf. Furthermore, over 90% of these documents were in English and experienced exponential growth. A greater proportion, 84% and 85%, of the outputs for Persian Gulf and Arabian Gulf, respectively, were published as articles. The subject area "Environmental Science Ecology" contains the highest number of scientific documents for both keywords. The co-occurrence network of the keywords demonstrates that for the keyword Persian Gulf, there are 572 keywords with a minimum occurrence of 5 which form 17 clusters containing 4290 links with a total link strength of 7766. In comparison, the fake name of Arabian Gulf has 490 keywords with a minimum frequency of 5 which form 15 clusters with 2389 links and a total link strength of 3864. For both keywords, the most frequently occurring and highest total link strength words were Gulf war illness, Arabian Gulf, Persian Gulf, and Gulf war syndrome. Also, “Taxonomy,” and “Ecological risk” were used currently. Iran (Persian Gulf) and Saudi Arabia (Arabian Gulf) are top countries and the highest level of collaboration has been with American researchers, while the least scientific participation took place among the countries at the border of the Persian Gulf. An investigation into the collaboration among universities and research institutes cleared that in terms of the Persian Gulf keyword, Islamic Azad University leads with 45 links and a total link strength of 1952, while in association with the fabricated keyword of Arabian Gulf, Kuwait University is the top with 159 links and a total links strength of 325.
The scientific collaborations among researchers showed that 75 percent of all scientific publications in terms of Persian Gulf and 79 percent of those deceptively labeled as Arabian Gulf were done through collaboration. For both keywords, the Persian Gulf and the Arabian Gulf (fake name) the strength of collaboration has been calculated as Degree of Collaboration (0.77;0.79), Collaborative Index (4.51; 4.51) and Collaborative Coefficient (0.57; 0.55) respectively. The co-authorship network analysis showed that in the Persian Gulf subject area, the top authors were Sina Dobaradaran with 46 documents and 160 total link strength as well as Kang H.K. who had 1450 citations while regarding the fake name of Arabian Gulf, John Burt topped with 55 documents, Bernhard Riegl 1497 citations and Haitham Amin total link strength of 191. Citation analysis showed that documents with Persian Gulf in the keywords totaled 7395 and received 132885 citations having an h-index of 129 with the highest 2021 while the fictional name Arabian Gulf achieved 3987 published texts received 72204 citations and an h-index of 95 in 2020.The top journal for publications of both keywords is " Marine Pollution Bulletin", with an impact factor of 5.3.
Conclusion: The growth rate of outputs related to the Persian Gulf is higher than that of the Arabian Gulf (fake name), while the diversity of topics and the level of participation are higher in the Arabian Gulf field (fake name). According to the citation factor, in terms of the Persian Gulf, the best authors belong to England and the United States, while in the field of Arabian Gulf (fake name), authors from Arabian countries at the border of this water basin have the greatest number of documents and citations.