ABSTRACT
In the current technological era, scientific research is considered as one of the crucial factors for developing human life. The main sources for producing scientific research are worldwide universities, institutions, research centers, and scientific laboratories. Therefore, it is important to evaluate the performance of these institutions in terms of research production and quality. The main reason for this evaluation is to improve the performance of researchers and eventually reflect this improvement in scientific research status. Moreover, the productivity and quality of the researchers in a particular university can be measured based on two main indicators, namely, research citations and research publishing venues.
In this thesis, the current scientific status of the main Iraqi universities is deeply investigated. To this end, a Citation Network is generated among them. This kind of network can reflect the actual scientific research status of the main Iraqi universities. The approach that is used in this thesis is based on the concepts of complex networks. For the data collection, a special-purpose program is designed to crawling the Google scholar repository and retrieve all the required data. This crawler is designed to collect the published research articles based on the official educational domains of the Iraqi universities.
The first main contribution of this work is to generate a citation network of the Iraqi main universities and extract the main facts on scientific research activities. The second contribution is proposing a local rank for the main Iraqi universities based on network measurements and other academic indicators. Another aspect that is investigated in this work is the scientific collaboration among the Iraqi universities and with the worldwide universities. Furthermore, this thesis also shows the current status of the Iraqi universities compared to the world in terms of the Scopus repository. Based on the obtained results, this thesis provides recommendations and suggestions on how to improve the performance of Iraqi universities in terms of scientific research and scientific collaboration among the universities.
The obtained results show an on-average performance of the scientific research in Iraqi universities according to network measurements such as the average clustering coefficient and the average path length. However, the University of Baghdad outperformed the other Iraqi universities in terms of the frequency of citations and the other network measurements. Also, the-top cited author was from the University of Baghdad in the field of Medicine with about 15566 citations (to the date of writing this thesis). However, the performance of scientific research in Iraq underperforms the neighbored countries such as Turkey, Iran, and KSA in terms of h-index, the number of the published papers, total citations, and the average citation per paper. The results also show that the collaboration among the Iraqi universities is based on the geographical area.
