The Second Day of Meeting of Secretaries General of National Commissions of ISESCO; A Report on Islamic Countries 13% Growth in Indexing Scientific Documents by Dr. Dehghani

About the number of the Islamic countries indexed documents, Mohammad-Javad Dehghani, dean of Islamic World Science Citation Center (ISC) and Regional Information Center for Science and Technology (RICeST), declared: “In 1998, 22,000 scientific documents have been indexed in Islamic countries which augmented to 250,000 documents in 2017, which means there has been a 13% growth annually in average.”

Based on the reports of ISC and RICeST Office of International Scientific Cooperation (OISC), Mohammad-Javad Dehghani made a speech on the second day of the meeting of secretaries general of National Commissions of ISESCO which is going on in RICeST right now.

He remarked: “ISC attempts to give access to qualitative information to ISESCO member countries in order for policy-making in science and research field. We try to improve the quality of our journals”

He expressed: “We have had a number of meetings with ISESCO Ministers of Education and signed several Memorandums of Understanding to empower the researchers of Islamic World. Up to now, ISC has engaged 48 countries by indexing journals of these countries. We aim at indexing more journals meeting the developed metrics.”

Explaining the activities of ISC, Dehghani emphasized: “The information of this database is used for policy-making and pursuing the activities, because in this database the performance of universities of Islamic countries is observed regarding the current indicators.”

He continued: “With this regard, rankings have taken place. For example, we have ranked 600 universities in engineering field.”

Pointing to priorities for improvement of higher education and research, dean of ISC stated: “However we have witnessed considerable growth in this regard, some countries are still far behind.”

According to Dehghani, Islamic countries should get improved with regard to the number of faculty members and published articles, and move towards internationalization.

Pointing to the perspective of ISC for ISESCO member countries, he said: “The share of ISESCO member countries in world science production, should increase 100% in the next 10 years. In addition, 50 universities should be included in the list of 500 top universities of the world, according to the international rankings up to 2026.”

About the number of indexed documents in Islamic countries, dean of RICeST said: “In 1998, 22,000 scientific documents have been indexed in Islamic countries which augmented to 250,000 documents in 2017, which means there has been a 13% growth annually in average.”

Dehghani mentioned: “In the last 20 years, among 20 top fields of research in Islamic countries, engineering has been the first and most active research field of ISESCO member countries. Chemistry, Computer Sciences, Metallurgy, and Mathematics are the next respectively.”

ISC dean declared: “In ranking systems, the number of articles should not be considered, but other criteria such as impact factor, number of citations, research activities, and R&D (Research and Development) should be regarded in international journals and international scientific cooperation, especially in Islamic countries.”