Sir
Your Editorial “Revival in Iran” (Nature 442, 719–720; 2006 10.1038/442719b) states that, in the 1990s, “Iran became the most scientifically productive country in the Middle East apart from Israel”. This is a misleading statement, true only when ignoring relative population size.
With a population of 68 million, Iran is the second largest country in the Middle East. It is impossible to compare small countries such as Lebanon, with 3.9 million inhabitants, or Jordan (5.9 million) to one that is 10 times more populous by merely counting the number of scientific publications. Population size should be normalized.
When the number of publications (see http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez) is corrected for population size, Iran becomes only the sixth in terms of scientific productivity. Israel, Kuwait, Lebanon, Jordan and Saudi Arabia top the list.
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Meshorer, E. Iran is sixth, not second, in Middle East publication list. Nature 443, 271 (2006). https://doi.org/10.1038/443271c
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/443271c
