319Technology Parks
As of 2012, Iran had officially 31 science and technology parks nationwide.
Furthermore, as of 2014, 36 science and technology parks hosting more than 3650
companies were operating in Iran. These firms have directly employed more than
24,000 people (Pargoo 2016 ). According to the Iran Entrepreneurship Association,
there are totally 99 parks of science and technology, which operate without official
permits (Coghlan 2011 ). As of 2014, Iran had also 930 industrial parks and zones,
of which 731 are ready to be ceded to the private sector.
Scientific Periodicals
According to the statistics, Iran produced 34,155 articles in 2012, which gained the
country the world’s 17th rank in science production and fixed its top position in the
region, above Turkey (Akhondzadeh 2013 ). Scientific progress over the past few
years was the result of the country’s recent policies and programs to develop knowl-
edge and facilitate researchers’ access to the world’s top academic resources. Iran
has the world’s fastest-growing scientific output, measured by the number of peer-
reviewed papers published in international journals. In addition, Iran ranked first in
scientific growth in the world in 2011 (Ibid: 1). In 2000, the Islamic Republic of Iran
ranked 53rd in the world in terms of highly cited medical articles but improved to
the 23rd rank in 2011. According to the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI),
Iranian researchers and scientists published a total of 60,979 scientific articles in
major international journals from 1999 to 2008. It is being said that scientific growth
in Iran has been fastest in the world, even more than China (Mirrazavi 2012 ). Iran
with a science and technology yearly growth rate of 25% is doubling its total output
every 3 years and at this rate will reach the level of Canadian annual output in 2017.
Because of these progresses, Head of the Islamic World Science Citation Center
(ISC) Mohammad Javad Dehqani announced that Iran is ascending on the steps of
scientific growth at a high speed despite being pressured by sanctions. He also said
that based on the information released in Scopus website (the largest abstract and
citation database of peer-reviewed literature), Iran has produced 1.5% of the world’s
science in 2011–2014, adding that the country’s share of science production since
the start of 2015 has been 1.7% (Dehqani 2015 ).
Development of Infrastructure
Through a short review on science growth over the past 35 years, Kharabaf and
Abdollahi ( 2012 ) believed that scientific growth of Iran is mainly related to the
thoughts of policy makers in paying more attention to science and technology and
18 Higher Education Research in Iran: Quantitative Development and Qualitative...