Inconsistent transliteration of Iranian university names: a hazard to Iran’s ranking in ISI Web of Science

Mohammad Reza Falahati Qadimi Fumani (), Marzieh Goltaji and Pardis Parto
Additional contact information
Mohammad Reza Falahati Qadimi Fumani: Regional Information Center for Science and Technology, RICeST
Marzieh Goltaji: Islamic World Science Citation Center
Pardis Parto: Department of Evaluation and Collection Development, RICeST

Scientometrics, 2013, vol. 95, issue 1, No 25, 384 pages

Abstract: Abstract Today, university ranking has turned into a critical issue in the world. Each university is identified with a surface form under which the whole performance of that university is assessed. This article intends to provide a clear picture of the inconsistencies observed in recording Iranian university titles by their affiliated authors and to clarify the negative impact of such inconsistencies in positioning Iranian universities in global university ranking systems. To collect various surface forms of Iranian university names, use was made of ISI Web of Science through keywords Cu = Iran and py = 2000–2009. Only MSRT universities were considered. Two M.A. experts listed all variant forms of a single university under that name. The form publicized in a university’s website was considered as its entry name. The major sources of variation identified were as follows: Acronyms, misspellings, abbreviations, space variations, syntactic permutation, application of vowels/consonants and vowel/consonant combinations, /a/vs./aa/, Tashdid, Kasra ezafe, redundancy, downcasing, voiceless glottal stop sound /?/, shortening and deletion of titles. It was found that at its present shape Iranian universities are not receiving the rank they really deserve simply because authors affiliated to a university use university title forms inconsistently. It was recommended that authors follow the surface form publicized by universities in their websites, use the help of an editor in their works, and not be credited for their articles in case the forms deviate from those publicized through the websites. A spell checker, as an add-ins software is highly needed to homogenize Iranian university surface forms by replacing the variants by the dominant form proposed.

Keywords: University ranking systems; Iranian universities; ISI Web of Science; Persian-English transliteration; Misspellings; Information retrieval; Persian orthography; Downcasing (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2013
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s11192-012-0818-2 Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:scient:v:95:y:2013:i:1:d:10.1007_s11192-012-0818-2

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/economics/journal/11192

DOI: 10.1007/s11192-012-0818-2

Access Statistics for this article

Scientometrics is currently edited by Wolfgang Glänzel

More articles in Scientometrics from Springer, Akadémiai Kiadó
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().