TEHRAN – Iranian Minister of Science Mohammad Ali Zolfigol and his Armenian counterpart Vahram Dumanyan emphasized the need to develop scientific and technological cooperation in an online meeting on Monday.

Zolfigol expressed interest in strengthening scientific and technological cooperation with Armenia, helping each other to be on the path of scientific growth and development.

“Iran has made good progress scientific research and technological activities in the world, in addition to being one of the top 15 countries in the world in terms of scientific production, and currently about 49 science and technology parks are active in the country.

In the field of basic sciences, holding scientific competitions between Iranian and Armenian students in basic sciences such as mathematics can be a field of cooperation,” he stated.

Establishing university branches to utilize the capacity of the technical and vocational education, as well as establishing a joint science and technology park and awarding a number of scholarships to Armenian students in priority fields for this country are among the areas that can be mentioned in the joint cooperation memorandum, he further said.

Dumanyan for his part said that progressive and high-level relations with the Islamic Republic are very important for the Armenian government, because Iranian universities have a high position in terms of science, and universities such as the Sharif University of Technology are world-famous.

The presence of Armenian students in the form of student camps or study opportunities in Iran is one of the areas of cooperation, and the collaboration of professors and faculty members can also be considered in the context of scientific cooperation, he explained.

He further considered the world programming competition in Armenia as one of the examples that can increase scientific interactions and Iranian students can participate in these competitions.

Iran’s science diplomacy at highest level in 20 years

Data from the Scopus International Citation Database show that Iran’s scientific diplomacy has reached more than 34 percent since the beginning of 2021, the highest level in the past 20 years.

Science diplomacy is the use of scientific collaborations among nations to address common problems and to build constructive international partnerships. It is a form of new diplomacy and has become an umbrella term to describe a number of formal or informal technical, research-based, academic, or engineering exchanges, within the general field of international relations.

Comparing the rate of 2020 with 2019, Iran with a growth of 12.5 percent and with a slight difference with India has gained second place in the world in terms of the growth of world science diplomacy, Mohammad Javad Dehghani, head of the Islamic World Science Citation Center (ISC), said.

In 2011, the share of Iranian articles with international participation was about 16.5 percent, which increased to 19.7 percent in 2016 and gradually in the following years, so that in 2020 and 2021, reached up to 30.5 and 34.2 percent, respectively, he further stated.

The share of Iranian articles with international participation has had significant growth of 209 percent during an eight-year period (2013-2020), becoming the Islamic world’s leading country in science diplomacy, according to the Scopus International Citation Database.

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