Japanese Envoy: Iran’s Scientific Achievements Remarkable

Japanese Ambassador to Iran Kinichi Komano said that Iran has made remarkable scientific achievements in the past couple of years.

Addressing a gathering of university students in Shiraz, the capital of the southern province of Fars, the ambassador said the brilliant achievements were made through great efforts of domestic manpower and experts, IRNA reported.

The ambassador voiced Tokyo’s readiness to share its technical experiences with the Islamic Republic of Iran.

During the last decade, Iran has made huge achievements in various fields of science and technology, from nuclear knowledge to stem cell and nano-technology. According to the statistics published by the Scopus bibliographic database, Iran published 19,559 articles from January to August 2012, President of the Islamic World Science Citation Center (ISC) Jafar Mehrad said.

According to Mehrad, Iran has ranked first in science production in the Middle East. He added that the figure has put Iran in the 16th place in the world in terms of science production.

Mehrad further stated that several developed and developing countries including Switzerland, Russia and Sweden stood after the Islamic Republic on the list. The countries that precede Iran in the list include China, Britain, Germany and Japan.

According to the statistics published in the journal Nature, Iran ranked first in scientific growth in the world in 2011. In 2000, the Islamic Republic ranked 53rd in the world in terms of highly cited medical articles, but the ranking improved to the 23rd in 2011. According to the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI), Iranian researchers and scientists published a total of 60,979 scientific articles in major international journals from 1999 to 2008.