Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.

Recently a nice movement has been started in the country by some wise, profound Professors. They have started a noble, magnificent work, which has been and I guess will be the starting point to many nice revolutionary movements in any area of research in our country.

Unfortunately research in Iran has been strongly exposed to some irrelevant issues. Some erroneous measures and misconceptions have affected the conduct of research activities. Plagiarism, copying without the original author’s permission or without considering the copyright issues have made an ill-looking, repulsive international countenance to the research activities in our universities and our country in General. You might have heard about the word ‘ISI’!!! It’s been a popular word among the people pretending to be researchers, nowadays. ISI, which stands for ‘Institute for Scientific Information‘, is an institution ran by ‘Thomson Scientific‘. ISI provides an indexing procedure which is based on citation reports. The word ‘citation’ in this context is simply the number of the times a paper or a research manuscript or report is referenced in other papers after the publication of the original paper. These citation reports published by ISI are known as the publication’s ‘Impact Factor‘. This impact factor (or IF for short) is said to be a good criterion to measure the quality of the papers published in a Journal.

In Iran for the last decade or so, this ‘ISI’ word itself has greatly influenced the people in the universities and in the research associations. PhD students need to publish papers in ISI indexed journals to be able to defend their theses. All the faculty members of universities, colleges and research centers need to publish papers in these journals to get promotions from their institute. If you want a PhD (or MSc) admission you need to publish papers. What’s more, a section in Iranian ministry science and technology is founded under the name ‘Science Generation’(!), which aims to increase the number of published papers in international publishing institutes. All these matters and that mostly the number of papers is important rather than the quality caused the fact that the quality of the publications are decreased and the number of them in national and international conference and journals have dramatically increased.

Recently, a lot of copied, non-original works have been copied in many international journals. (Even some popular people did so.) In smaller scales a lot of such works is done by students, translating English papers and publishing them in conferences inside Iran under their own name, just to be able to defend their MSc thesis (as an example ) and get their Grade(!). Our a lot of dissertations are copied in our universities, from one university to the other. Also, different institutes are working around the country, which publish low-quality papers in non-standard, low-graded but ISI indexed journals. One could be found here.

This, all and all has strongly affected the original research works in our country. One needs to really do something about it and we do really need to manage this situation. A number of professors in the universities inside and outside Iran started a movement to control the situation. They believe that this is because the lack of enough instruction among the students or even some of the instructors and professors in the universities. They have started a blog ‘Professors Against Plagiarism‘ which discusses all these issues. I do really admire their effort and I hope them success. Also, an excellent instructing material regarding all these maters was prepared and presented by Dr. Kiarash Bazargan, which could be found here.

By the way, another indicator known as SJR is also available which could replace ISI and Impact Factor. It is said to be a better way to evaluate journals and publications.

It’s been a long time I could not find time to post something here. I was so busy. A lot of different things happened. A lot of nice happenings. I’m glad for all, that. I’ll talk about it in my next post, I hope. Anyway, I’ll get back again. Soon, soon enough.