TEHRAN – Iranian researcher, Seyed Hadi Borhani, has won the fifth edition of Mahathir Mohammad Award for Intellectual Creativity, which honored outstanding researchers on the theme ‘Palestine: A Pillar of Civilizational Renaissance’.

His research, titled ‘Islamic world: After and Under Zionism’, is the winner of the third place of this prestigious award, in recognition of the role of the research in analyzing intellectual and geopolitical developments related to Palestine, ISNA reported.

This award is granted annually to researchers who have made outstanding contributions to the production of knowledge. It is held under the auspices of the ‘Islamic World Forum for Thought and Civilization’ chaired by Mahathir Mohamad, former Prime Minister of Malaysia. The award is named after Mahathir Mohamad in honor of his contributions to the development of Malaysia.

Roulami Abdelhamid from Algeria, and Saleh Abdul Raouf from Egypt received the first and second award, respectively.

The first part of Borhani’s research shows that the intellectual foundations of Zionism are inherently anti-Islamic and are based on a zero-sum concept that considers the monopoly of Palestine and the weakening of the civilizational power and unity of the Islamic world as a condition for the survival of Israel and the continuation of its colonial project.

The second part provides a practical analysis of Israel’s strategies, covering five main areas: direct military aggression and occupation, the forced maintenance of military and nuclear superiority, the collapse of Islamic societies and states, discursive campaigns to destroy the image of the Islamic world, and the use of Western powers as a tool to put pressure on Islamic countries.

Over 1,140 Iranians among world’s 1% most-cited researchers

A total of 1,142 Iranian researchers have been recognized among the world’s top one percent most-cited researchers in 2025, compared to 1,056 identified researchers in 2024, according to the Islamic World Science Citation (ISC) Institute.

The Ministry of Health, Treatment, and Medical Education (with 603 entries) accounts for 52.77 percent, and the Ministry of Science, Research and Technology (with 427 researchers) represents 37.43 percent of the most-cited Iranian researchers, isc.ir reported.

Clinical medicine, with 446 entries, Engineering with 219 entries, Pharmacology and Toxicology with 163 entries, Chemistry with 140 entries, Neuroscience and Behavior with 115 entries, Agriculture Sciences with 100 entries, and Social Sciences with 77 entries held the highest shares of the most-cited researchers.

Three Iranian researchers have been among the highly cited award recipients.

Essential Science Indicators (ESI) data covers a 10-year period and includes bimonthly updates to rankings and citation counts.

Clarivate regularly publishes research impact metrics through the ESI, identifying top-performing research indexed in the Web of Science (WoS) Core Collection. Each journal indexed in the WoS Core Collection is assigned to one of the 22 research fields. Author rankings are calculated based on the citations received by an author in a 10-year period in each research field. Among all authors producing research in the same research field, those ranking in the top one percent by citations would be regarded as top one percent scholars.
MT/MG