30 years of agronomic research in iran: i. evaluation of trends, gaps and setting priorities

during the last few decades scientific researches in different fields of agricultural sciences have been grown drastically. however, there is no published study, if any, on structural analysis of the national agricultural research system of iran and setting priorities for the future. in the present study 2361 scientific papers published during the three decades in the domestic journals were surveyed to analyze the research structure, gaps and priorities. the papers were categorized based on crop species, temporal and spatial scale of experiments, subject and type of the researches and the results were subjected to the statistical analysis. number of published papers followed a sigmoid growth further with a long lag period of 10 years and leveled off at 240 papers per year. cereals and industrial crops had the highest frequency in the surveyed papers while forage, medicinal and pulse crops were the next abundant species, respectively. annual experiments (83% of total papers) were the most frequent for all crops however, less than 10% of papers were the result of biannual experiments (> 2 years). in addition frequency of experiments conducted in research stations and protected environments (laboratory and greenhouse) were 58 and 30%, respectively indicating the small contribution of studies at regional/national scale. management practices were the most prevalent topics among the papers (35% of total). however, sustainability of agroecosystems, agricultural climatology and crop modeling were less frequent subjects (<5% of total) and the other subjects covered 5-10% of total papers. such a research gap was almost the same for all crop species. overall, 64% of total papers were related to applied studies while contribution of strategic and basic studies was 10 and 1%, respectively. based on the results it was concluded that despite quantitative growth of the published papers, national agricultural research system is not highly efficient. while applied researches and testing agronomic practices in short duration studies are widespread, long term strategic studies on the sustainability of production systems and conservation of resource base, impacts of climate change on national food security and protection of agrobiodiversity at national/regional scales are almost overlooked.