ISC is aimed at creating a fruitful cooperation and communication among the authors all over the world.
One-fifth of the world’s population are Muslims living in 57 countries, extending from Mauritania to Indonesia. A number of Islamic countries possess natural wealth, others have a greater potential of manpower, but there are few of them which are rich in high level of standard in education and research. Recently, Muslim scientists have achieved many scientific findings. So, there was a need for a scientific center to make opportunities for them to share their achievements, and transfer them to the fellow countries in order to improve the level of education and scientific knowledge in the Islamic World.
The Islamic World Science Citation Center (ISC) is one of the major scientific centers analyzing and evaluating the researches, whose aim is to encourage technical and scientific cooperation among Muslim scientists and organizations, and also between the Islamic world and other countries as well. One of its advantages over other scientific journals is that it encompasses national languages, giving chance to the authors in non-English language countries to represent their accomplished researches through an international channel.
Theoretical scientometrics is meticulously benefited by ISC. And lately, a wide range of disciplines are included in ISC databases among which a considerable number of titles are specified to different fields of medicine and health. Currently, there are more than 550 titles indexed in ISC which deal with the subject and among them, about 200 of these titles have gained IF (Impact Factor) according to the automatic citation analysis applied on them. Totally, 134 English journals in the field of medicine are lately indexed in ISC database (1).
ISC was established by the Iranian Ministry of Science, Research and Technology after being approved by the Organization of the Islamic Conference (2). Nowadays, 10 countries including Iran, Pakistan, Turkey, Malaysia, Nigeria, Egypt, Indonesia, Bangladesh, UAE, Lebanon, and Senegal consist 78% of the whole journals of the Islamic countries (3).
Related to the subject, ISI and SCOPUS possess the most well-known databases but due to paying due attention to English language and consequently maintaining a discrimination toward other languages and authors, a new databases known as ISC came into the scene involving most of the languages including English, Arabic, Turkish, Persian, etc. which is an advantageous attempt to eliminate the mentioned discrimination.
Although the ISC is newly organized compared to the major journals like ISI and SCOPUS, because of its high quality and authenticity, it is recently considered as one of the most important and popular centers which perform an important role in the research area. Because of its web-based features, ISC products are accessible worldwide and because of its applicability, ISI and SCOPUS are getting more interested in further cooperation with ISC.
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