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Policymakers and experts should trust health studies. On the other hand, it should be considered by the general public. Altmetrics, as a new method, seeks to examine the social effects of researchers' scientific outputs along with citation analysis indices. The present study aims to investigate the effectiveness of the articles published by researchers in the field of waterpipe/cigarette smoking on the Web of Science database during 2010-2019. This paper is a descriptive-analytical study with a correlational approach in the citation analyses using the Altmetrics index. The statistical population consists of papers on waterpipe/cigarette smoking by Middle Eastern researchers during 2010-2019 published on the Web of Science. The data is extracted using the Altmetrics Bookmarklet and analyzed it by excel and SPSS.From the total number of scientific articles in the field of waterpipe/cigarette smoking by Middle Eastern researchers during the research period, 1,086 articles were indexed on the Web of Science, and only 2% of them had no Digital Object Identifiers (DOI) or PubMed Identifiers (PMID); on the contrary, 50% of the articles had Altmetrics scores. Among the social networks cited by the researchers of the Middle Eastern countries in the field of waterpipe/cigarette smoking, the shares of social networks, namely Dimensions, Mendeley, and Twitter, were the most. The most significant number of citations of the articles on Mendeley and Twitter belonged to U.S. and U.K. users. Also, medicine and dentistry had the highest number of Mendeley citations. The correlation coefficient between the altmetrics score and citation index was poor but significant (R=0.32, P <0.05). The publication of research papers on the social web (i.e., social networks) increases the visibility of the documents and makes them visible to a broad audience. This is effective in the future of citations of articles on citation databases. This further increases the qualitative performance indices of the papers by receiving more citations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A comparative study of the university systems of the countries of the Near East has been undertaken in this paper. It has been illustrated that the most competitive systems in terms of World University Rankings are the university systems of Iran, Israel, and Saudi Arabia. This conclusion, at a glance, was made based on the distribution of all the universities of 14 countries of the Near East by the ten World University Rankings. This conclusion was confirmed in a more detailed manner upon entering and calculating three integral indicators of country university competitiveness. They were expressed by multiplying and adding the number of the universities of the countries mentioned in the rankings mentioned above and the average values of the positioning of the universities in these systems. Together with the number of universities distributed among the countries, these three indicators correlated well with each other. The devised methodology of a quantitative assessment of country university competitiveness is proposed for a comparative study of this competitiveness in random groups of countries worldwide. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study aims to examine the research output in engineering by the Middle East countries. The data on engineering research by Middle East countries were collected from Web of Science. Collected data were analyzed with various tools such as Average Annual Growth Rate (AAGR), Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR), Activity Index (AI), and Relative Specialization Index (RSI). The level of regional and international cooperation in the Middle East countries was also identified. Findings showed Iran has the highest overall performance in total documents, total citations, h-index, and highly cited papers, but most of the publications by Yemen were international cooperation. Iran, Kuwait, Oman, Saudi Arabia, UAE, and Yemen in the field of petroleum engineering; Bahrain and Qatar in industrial engineering; Turkey in geological engineering; Syria in agricultural engineering; Lebanon in medical engineering; Israel in cell & tissue engineering; Iraq in civil engineering; Egypt in Chemical Engineering; and Jordan in Software Engineering have the highest RSI in their countries. Results show that Iran had the best performance in most of the indicators (quantitative indices) and Saudi Arabia has good performance in qualitative indices among Middle East countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]