Changes in the Geographic Pattern of Iran's International Collaboration in Cardiovascular Research: A 15-Year Period

Abstract

BackgroundCardiovascular Diseases (CVDs) which are considered as the major public health problems, result in substantial increases in economic and health care costs, and are the first leading cause of death worldwide. Clinical research are the backbone of attempts to build and conduct evidence-based policies to perform the best caring of CVDs. International collaborations, increase the quality of research. Therefore, the present study was conducted in order to assess the changes in the geographic pattern of Iran's international cardiovascular research collaborations.MethodsThis study was a systematic review with scientometrics approaches. Numbers and rates of international research collaborations were extracted from the Web of Science database. Results are reported as figures by Graph Pad v6 and Arc GIS v7 software.ResultsThe results showed that, 18.3% of all Iran's cardiovascular research have been conducted with international collaborations. The increasing rates were 14.4%, 16.5%, and 21.3% in the time periods of 2004-2009, 2010-2014, and 2015-2019, respectively. The obtained results indicated that, the United States was the first research partner of Iran in the field of cardiovascular and the other partners were England, Australia, Italy and Poland; respectively.ConclusionThis study provides a global description of a changing pattern of the international research collaboration behavior of Iran and also indicates that the international research collaboration follow a logical trend in the cardiovascular field. Building effective international research collaboration networks as well as encouraging researchers to work in these networks can be considered by policy makers in university levels in the future.