Rezaei-Ghaleh Nasrollah, Azizi Fereidoun
Endocrine Research Center, Shaheed Beheshti University of Medical Sciences, Tehran, Iran.
Arch Iran Med. 2007 Apr;10(2):182-9.
The journal impact factor is increasingly employed to evaluate the quality of scientific research. This is in contrary to its critical limitations, e.g., its marked variation across scientific disciplines. This study was conducted to describe, in both quantitative and qualitative terms, the contribution of Iranian universities and research institutes to biomedical publications in 2004 and to examine the possible effect of impact factor normalization by subject on their rankings.
The Iranian biomedical articles were recruited from Thomson Science Citation Index Expanded and PubMed databases according to Thomson Scientific subject categorization of journals. Three subject-normalized impact factors were employed: rank-normalized impact factor, journal to field impact score, and standardized impact factor.
Tehran and Shiraz Universities of Medical Sciences and University of Tehran were the top three institutes regarding the sum of impact factor in 2004. On the basis of the mean crude impact factor, Sharif University of Technology, University of Shiraz, and Baqiyatollah University were ranked as the first to third. However, the subject normalization of impact factor made some considerable changes in impact factor-based rankings of research institutes.
The Iranian scientific community and science development policy makers are recommended to employ subject-normalized impact factor, rather than crude impact factor, in quality assessment of biomedical research held in various academic and research institutes.
期刊影响因子越来越多地用于评估科学研究的质量。这与其严重局限性相悖，例如，其在各科学学科间存在显著差异。本研究旨在从定量和定性两方面描述2004年伊朗各大学和研究机构对生物医学出版物的贡献，并考察按学科对影响因子进行标准化处理对其排名的可能影响。
根据汤姆森科学公司的期刊学科分类，从汤姆森科学引文索引扩展版和PubMed数据库中收集伊朗生物医学文章。采用了三种学科标准化影响因子：排名标准化影响因子、期刊与领域影响得分以及标准化影响因子。
就2004年影响因子总和而言，德黑兰医科大学、设拉子医科大学和德黑兰大学位列前三。基于平均原始影响因子，伊朗科技大学、设拉子大学和巴基耶塔拉大学排名第一至第三。然而，影响因子的学科标准化使基于影响因子的研究机构排名发生了一些显著变化。
建议伊朗科学界和科学发展政策制定者在对各学术和研究机构开展的生物医学研究进行质量评估时，采用学科标准化影响因子，而非原始影响因子。
