Forestry Research in the Middle East: A Bibliometric Analysis

Abstract

Research trends in the field of forestry have experienced a significant evolution in recent years. However, there has been little use of bibliometric analyses to assess academic organizations and individual researchers in this field of science. This study investigates the progress of forestry research in Iran, Israel, and Turkey based on a bibliometric analysis of 2482 documents published between 2005 and 2019 and indexed in the Web of Science (WoS) scientific information platform. The countries were analyzed and compared in terms of the number of documents, the number of citations, the mean number of citations per document, the h-index, the share of funded articles, and several other metrics. A complete keyword network with graphical visualization and cluster analysis was also used for depicting the most frequent keywords used by the authors from these three countries. The results showed that the number of publications on forestry research grew steadily during the study period. Turkey, with 1529 documents, was the most active in publishing research in the field of forestry, followed by Iran (726 documents) and Israel (219 documents). Turkey’s publications received 11,220 citations with a cooperation coefficient (CC) of 0.587 that revealed a strong relationship between international collaboration with the USA, Germany, and Italy, and the number of citations, such that the articles with co-authors affiliated to foreign institutions were cited far more often than the articles with Turkish authorship. Although Iran (CC = 0.680) and Israel (CC = 0.706) recorded more activities in international collaboration than Turkey, their publications received much lower citations (Iran’s citations = 4433, Israel’s citations = 3939). Israel had 136 articles (62%) that received research funding, followed by Turkey and Iran with 604 (39%) and 284 (38%) articles. Nine out of the ten most popular journals among Israeli researchers were ranked as quartiles 1 and 2 in the forestry category, whereas Iranian and Turkish researchers mostly published in fewer journals ranked as quartiles 1 and 2. The most frequent keywords (i.e., topics) were species, condition, forest, and tree. Insights provided here can help balance research activities towards publishing more informed and effective scientific articles.