A Comparative Study of the Status of Scientific Collaboration Based on Centrality Measures in the Middle East Countries' Retracted Articles

Document Type : Original Article

Authors

1 Master of Scientometrics, Department of Information Science and Knowledge Studies, Faculty of Management, University of Tehran, Tehran, Iran.

2 Assistant Prof., Department of Information Science and Knowledge Studies, Faculty of Management, University of Tehran, Tehran, Iran.

3 Master Student of Scientometrics, Department of Information Science and Knowledge Studies, Faculty of Management, University of Tehran, Tehran, Iran.

4 Department of Knowledge and Information Science, Faculty of Management, University of Tehran, Iran.

Abstract

The present study aimed to compare the status of scientific collaborations based on the network centrality measures of retracted works in the Middle East countries. In the present study, the bibliometric analysis method, with the scientometrics approach and visualization techniques, was used to visualize scientific collaborations. Research data consisted of 537 records for the years 1975 to 2020 were extracted from the WOS database. Gephi, NodeXL and VOSviewer software are also used to draw collaboration maps and advanced network analysis. The results showed that Iran has a potential role in establishing negative relations with other countries. Most international collaborations have taken place between Egypt and Saudi Arabia. The findings also showed that, in general, Iran had the highest amount of network centrality measures. Concerning the collaboration of universities, the highest number of collaborations occurred between the Islamic Azad University and the University of Tehran. In general, the highest degree of collaboration, Betweenness centrality, closeness centrality, and eigenvector centrality devoted to Islamic Azad University. The results showed that Iran has a potential role in establishing negative relations among other countries. The results also indicate that most of the retracted works have been published by Iranian universities, especially public and medical sciences universities. Since scientific collaboration was very strong among writers of the retracted works, it can be argued that scientific collaboration as an indicator for quantitative and qualitative evaluation of scientific works does not produce a positive result in all cases.

Keywords

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Volume 6, Issue 1 - Serial Number 10
September 2020
Pages 223-246
  • Receive Date: 17 June 2020
  • Revise Date: 29 July 2020
  • Accept Date: 01 September 2020