thirty-nine years of iran’s scientific products in the field of geophysics

identifying and measuring the impact and value of scientific output plays an important role in today’s world of information overload. on one side, governments are trying to distribute research funds in ways that support research in strategically important fields, on the other side, researchers and scientists are seeking to access only relevant and quality information that have mainly worthy of their attention. nowadays, countries are evaluated not only by their national products, military power, geographical area, etc., but also by such factors as the production and consumption of scientific information. scientometric approaches are used to provide appropriate tools for evaluating scientific products at local, national, and international levels. these tools have a number of advantages, including identifying core and significant journals, authors, institutions, universities, and papers; navigating thoughts and developing literature and resources; anticipating scientific products trend; visualizing different subject fields and determining the most important subjects; identifying collaboration and co-authorship patterns; comparing courtiers based on scholarly publications etc. regarding to the above-mentioned tools it seems that citation indexes and databases such as scopus database are suitable tools, which can measure scientific products in all the fields. scientific products of geophysics, the same as other fields constitute a part of the iran's scientific output. the purpose of this study is better to understand the scientific production of geophysics and to present a scientific map. this study is a descriptive approach using scientometric methods. the population of this research comprises of 1996 documents indexed in scopus database. network workbench tool (nwb) software was used for mapping and other data were extracted manually. the results showed that the published papers of iranian researchers in the field of geophysics showed a good trend in period of 1975-2013. the contributaion of iran in the geophysics outputs constituted 0.65% of total publications and ranked 30 in the world during 39 years. riahi from tehran university and ataei from shahrood university were the most productive authors in the field of geophysics. tehran university and islamic azad university accounted for most products in geophysics. most of articles were published in the journal of the earth and space physics released by the institute of geophysics, university of tehran, journal of geophysics and engineering, geophysical journal international, and journal of asian earth sciences. a writing pattern of three and more authors had the highest frequency. results indicated that the level of productivity for single author or one-author products is stagnating and the number of publications with two and three or more authors is increasing sharply. fifty-nine countries had the most academic collaboration with iranian researchers in geophysics field. iran has collaborated more often with usa, england, and france. the international cooperation is much lower than the national cooperation. from 1996 articles were extracted 5304 subjects and iran, zagros, artificial neural network, fuzzy logic, tehran, inversion, seismic attributes, simulation, resistivity, and earthquake were the most important topics in the field of geophysics. in addition, it was found that most papers in the field of geophysics were in geophysical observation, instrumentation, and techniques.