Evaluation of authorship patterns in Iranian articles and its relation to citations

Background and aim: Scientific collaborations increase citations and its results in the others' research. This aim of this study was to determine the number of authors in different majors of humanities, basic sciences and arts and the relationship between the number of authors and number of citations on Iranian articles indexed in the Web of Science. Material and methods: The present study was conducted using descriptive and analytical methods through scientometric methods. The research population was all articles published by Iranian researchers on the topics of basic sciences, humanities and art, indexed in the Web of Science in 2012, which were 17671 documents. The number of citations of articles has been recorded by May 2016. The year of 2016 was selected for the articles in the various categories would have enough time to get the citation. Data were collected via referring to articles in each field, counting the number of authors in each article and the number of citations received each article until May 2016. Bib Excel, Excel, and SPP softwares were used to analyzed the data. Findings: This research has shown that the largest share of research collaboration in Iran is in a group of two to five people. Moreover, there was a relationship and correlation between the number of authors and the number of citations in different majors. Conclusion: Among the examined categories, the field of medicine had the highest correlation coefficient between the number of authors and the number of citations, and archeology had the lowest correlation