the presence of iran and its counterparts in pathology and forensic medicine during 1996 to 2010

background and objective: since it is essential for the research policy makers to acquire knowledge about the global ranks of their countries in in pathology and forensic medicine subject areas, scientometrics experts have been always ranking and analyzing countries on the basis of ‘total number of papers’, ‘total number of citations’ and ‘citations per paper’, etc. materials and methods: the data in scimago[1] has been used to analyze and evaluate the global ranks of iran, turkey, saudi arabia, india, pakistan, south korea and south africa. these countries had a similar growth trend in many indicators of science and technology in the past. results: this article mainly deals with the extent of presence of these countries in pathology and forensic medicine subject areas, their international global ranks and comparing them with each other. furthermore, data show that these countries had a different situation considering “citations per document”; because it did not match with their “number of document” and “total number of citations” to their papers and did not increase accordingly. “citations per document” is considered as one of the most important indicators which show the average number of citations to each document. conclusion: the situation of iran under the study seemed to be better in some areas such as ‘cite per documents’ than their situation in other areas; however, this point should be taken into consideration that they did not have an equal presence in all areas. [1] the scimago journal & country rank is a portal that includes the journals and country scientific indicators developed from the information contained in the scopus database