Nephrology research output in Iran in a decade

We performed a bibliometric search to evaluate the number of papers written by the Iranian nephrologists.

We considered all peer-reviewed articles published by nephrologists in biomedical journals quoted by the Medline database and the IranMedex (an Iranian database for indexing medical articles of local journals) between 1997 and 2007. The findings were analyzed according to the university from which the publication was originated, field of study, type of work, specialty of the first author (nephrologist or nonnephrologist), type of journal (indexed or nonindexed in Medline), total number of publications, the annual and 10-year collaboration rate of the Iranian nephrologists, and publications per faculty members of medical institutions.

The total number of publications in the field kidney disease was 579 (average of 58 papers per year). There was an increasing trend in the number of publications over the years. More than 56% of the publications (324) were in the internationally recognized journals that were indexed in the Medline. The majority of the papers were concerned with transplantation (58.3%), nephrology (20.0%), and hemodialysis (16.8%). Of all the publications traced in this study, 67.5% were retrospective articles, whereas the proportion of clinical trials was relatively small (6.1%).

Iran's contribution to the research on kidney disease is not satisfactory in terms of the volume and quality of publications. On the other hand, the data suggest that there was a significant research activity in the field of kidney transplantation during the studied period.