Based on a report by the scientific ranking site SCImago hosted by Spain's University of Granada, Iran ranks first in aerospace in the Middle East and 11th in the world.
"Statistics released by the site indicate that Iran has advanced to higher positions in the field of aerospace products in 2015," Parviz Karami, a scientific official from Iran's Presidential Office said, IFP reports.
"Iran ranked 11th in terms of scientific production in aerospace in 2015, higher than Spain, the Netherlands, Brazil, the Switzerland, Mexico and Ukraine," he added.
According to the official, Iran's ranking in 2015 is due to its publication of 341 articles and 101 world-class citations. SCImago Journal Rank (SJR indicator) is a measure of scientific influence of scholarly journals that accounts for both the number of citations received by a journal and the importance or prestige of the journals where such citations were published.
The SJR indicator is a variant of the eigenvector centrality measure used in network theory.
Inspired by the PageRank algorithm, the indicator has been developed for use in extremely large and heterogeneous journal citation networks. It is a size-independent indicator and its values order journals by their "average prestige per article" and can be used for journal comparisons in science evaluation processes.
