Citing National Publications as a metrics for localization of Science: A Study on Scholar Journals of Social Science Domain in Iran from 2002 to 2010

Citing national publications is considered as a qualitative measure for science localization in the current research. Consequently, the aim is to study this metric within the corpus of Iranian Scholar Journals in Social Science Domain between 2002 and 2010. Methodology: The research uses the citation analysis method. The references of six social science scholar journals were extracted from the papers and they were then divided into two groups of national and foreign publications. The studied journals were those which were regularly published in Iran between 2002 and 2010. The analysis performed on a sample of 543 papers out of 1528 ones. The sampling method was based on the Cochran’s function. Findings: An ANOVA test showed that the average number of citing to the national publications is statistically unchanged in the journal’s papers during the period mentioned above. On the other hand, the same average for foreign publications is growing. The correlation analysis determined that this growth follows a logarithmic function. The other finding concerns the differences between the average numbers of citing to the national publications in the studied journals. A one way ANOVA test revealed a difference between the journals from this point of view. Based on the Tukey’s Range Test the results of ANOVA test is affected by the "Journal of Women Strategic Studies". It means, if this journal were omitted from the analysis, the rest five ones would statistically have the same rate of citing to the national publications. The citing rate to national publications ranges between 0.31 and 0.39 except for the Journal mentioned above. Conclusion: Based on this metric, the tendency toward the use of national publications in the social science domain is constant despite the number of scientific productions is growing in Iran. This means that the Iranian social science domain not only doesn’t tend to the science localization but its use of foreign science is growing in the span of time as well.