TEHRAN – A total of 1,142 Iranian researchers were recognized in the top one percent of the world’s most cited researchers in 2025, while 1,056 were recognized in 2024, according to the Islamic World Science Citation Society (ISC).
Isc.ir reports that the Ministry of Health, Treatment and Medical Education (603 entries) accounts for 52.77 percent, while the Ministry of Science, Research and Technology (427 researchers) accounts for the most cited Iranian researchers, accounting for 37.43 percent.
Clinical medicine had the highest share of most cited researchers with 446, engineering with 219, pharmacology and toxicology with 163, chemistry with 140, neuroscience and behavioral science with 115, agriculture with 100, and social science with 77.
Three Iranian researchers are among the highly acclaimed award winners.
Essential Science Indicators (ESI) data covers 10 years and includes bimonthly updates of rankings and citation counts.
Clarivate regularly publishes research impact metrics through ESI to identify the best research indexed in the Web of Science (WoS) Core Collection. Each journal indexed in the WoS Core Collection is assigned to one of 22 research areas. Author rankings are calculated based on the number of citations an author receives in each research field over a 10-year period. Authors who rank in the top 1 percent in terms of citations among all authors working in the same field of study are considered top 1 percent scholars.
More than 2,770 Iranians are in the top 2% of the world
Stanford University, in collaboration with Elsevier, placed a total of 2,772 Iranian researchers in the top 2 percent of its annual list of most-cited scientists based on lifetime impact.
This version is based on the August 2025 snapshot from Scopus and updated through the citation end year 2024.
This work uses Scopus data. Calculations were performed using all Scopus author profiles as of August 1, 2025.
According to the standard Science-Metrix classification, scientists are classified into 22 scientific fields and 174 subfields. All scientists with at least five publications will also be provided with discipline- and sub-discipline-specific percentiles.
Lifetime data is updated through the end of 2024, and recent single data pertains to citations received during the 2024 calendar year.
Selection is based on the top 100,000 scientists by C-score (with or without self-citation) or percentile rank of 2% or higher in the subfield.
Lifetime assessments capture a scientist’s cumulative research impact over their entire career up to the end of the previous calendar year (end of 2024).
This ranking uses a composite citation metric (c-score). It combines several bibliographic criteria to provide a comprehensive measure of a scientist’s lasting impact, focusing on quality and importance rather than mere quantity of publications.
The criteria used to calculate the c-score include total citations (NC), H-index (H), coauthor-adjusted hm-index, number of citations to single-author papers (NCS), number of citations to single-author or first-author papers (NCSF), and number of citations to single-author, first-author, or last-author papers (NCFSL).
According to the latest international data, the presence of Iranian researchers in the world’s top two percent list based on citation indicators continues to trend upward, indicating an improvement in the quality of the country’s scientific production.
The well-regarded Standardized Citation Index Science-Wide Author Database Update, which provides an updated version of scientist rankings based on standardized indicators, reported on September 19 that Iran has achieved unprecedented growth in both one-year performance and scientific lifetime indicators, IRNA quoted Deputy Science Minister Peyman Salehi as saying.
Based on this report, the number of Iranian researchers highly cited in one-year performance index increased from 2,326 in Iran 1403 (2024-2025) to 2,533 in Iran 1404 (2025-2026).
He explained that this figure represents an increase of 207 people compared to the previous year and clearly indicates the improvement in the quality and impact of the country’s scientific production in 2024.
The medical field (853 researchers) for one-year achievements and the engineering field (287 researchers) for lifetime achievements produced the most cited Iranian researchers.
Additionally, the number of highly cited Iranian researchers in the lifetime index increased significantly from 1,018 in 1403 to 1,021 in 1404. A five-year trend analysis shows that Iran achieved this remarkable achievement from 433 people in 1399.
Single-year indexes focus on the number of citations a paper received in a particular year.
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