TEHRAN – The Iranian Ministry of Science is ready to offer 20 scholarships to Malian students in line with the policy to expand science diplomacy with other countries.

Science Minister Mohammad-Ali Zolfigol made the remarks in a meeting with Malian Foreign Minister Abdoulaye Diop in Tehran on Sunday.

Zolfigol also emphasized the need for setting up a joint working group to follow up on establishing a technical-vocational university by Iran in the African country.

The Malian official, for his part, referred to the high status of Iran worldwide in science and technology, saying that Iran is a good example for those countries which want to stand against the global arrogant powers and their unfair sanctions.

Data from the Scopus International Citation Database show that Iran’s science 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.

Moreover, studies show that Iran enters the year 2022 with the 15th rank in science production worldwide and it is expected to make progress over the next years as the coronavirus pandemic is going to ease.

A country’s scientific products are a collection of research, articles, citations, international collaborations, activities of researchers, educational and research institutions of a country.

In reviewing scientific products, various indicators such as publication of articles in prestigious international journals, citations, validity of journals, the level of productivity, and scientific impact of scientists are considered quantitatively and qualitatively.

According to the latest information on science production, Iran is ranked 15th in the world in the international system of Web of Science in 2021, with an h-index of 383, which indicates the quality of Iranian articles registered.

Iran’s scientific position in the Web of Science over the last 5 years shows that the production of conference papers has been on a downward trend during 2020 and 2021 due to the outbreak.

The share of Iranian science production from conference papers has dropped from 7.38 percent in 2017 to 1.26 percent in 2021.

MG