The Iran Daily boasted Saturday that the latest Thomson-Reuters listing of “Highly Cited Researchers” names 25 Iranian scientists. What it failed to say was that the global list totals 3,215 scientists, so the 25 Iranians amount to fewer than 0.8 percent of the total. The Iran Daily also said that 14 of the 25 Iranians are at the Tehran University of Medical Sciences, a boon for that school but a blow to the country’s other universities. The list is compiled by a computer that counts how often published scientific papers are cited in other scientific papers, which is generally viewed as a key measure of the quality of the work.
