Contribution of Iran to the Ophthalmic Literature over the Past Three Decades

Dear Editor, The number of publications plays a major role in assessing scientific progress in different countries. To determine the status of our country in terms of the number of published papers in indexed peer-reviewed medical journals, we searched MEDLINE/PubMed. This database belongs to the National Library of Medicine, the world’s largest biomedical library located in Bethesda, Maryland, USA, which is freely accessible and contains over 18 million journal citations since 1948.1 This approach has been applied to ascertain the contribution of different countries to scientific articles in different medical fields as well as ophthalmology.2-5 We searched PubMed for articles from different ophthalmic institutions which had mentioned their country of origin in the affiliation field. To have a better view, we compared Iran to some other developing, as well as developed countries, in terms of the number of ophthalmic publications. As all countries were not included in this search, the results do not reflect a comprehensive, but rather comparative ranking of different countries. We selected countries presumed to be influential in the field of ophthalmology and vision research. The search results were limited to a 30-year period, from 1981 to the end of 2010. The total number of indexed papers from ophthalmic institutions during the above mentioned period was 119,640. The overall number of Iranian publications rose dramatically over the recent years, especially during the last decade (Fig. 1). There are 22 nations in the Eastern Mediterranean region (EMR); some countries with a larger number of publications in our search are reported in Table 1. During the same period of time, India and Turkey had 2,820 and 2,401 publications, respectively. Table 2 shows the overall number of ophthalmic publications in some developed countries. Countries such as India, China and Turkey have demonstrated significant growth in the number of publications and reached volumes exceeding certain developed countries . Similarly, the number of Iranian ophthalmologic publications has shown a significant increase over the past 30 years. In addition to the crude number of publications, citations to a paper is of great importance and shows the impact of