iran’s contribution to child and adolescent mental healthresearch (1973–2002): a scientometric analysis

objective: this study aimed to describe the characteristics of iran’s child and adolescent mental health research published from 1973 to 2002. method: the articles were drawn from iranpsych, which is a national database of published research in mental health and related fields. this database gathers scientific papers on psychiatry, psychology, and neuroscience published in both national and international journals. bibliometric data, general scientific areas of research, specific subject topics and research design, were extracted from aticles. egypt was selected as one of the middle east countries that has some similarities with iran. iranian and egyptian child and adolescent mental health research articles indexed in isi 1994 to 2004 also were compared. results: from a total of 883 articles, 9% appeared in international journals. there was a marked increase in the number of publications over time, especially in the last 5 years. psychology and clinical research constituted 70%, and 32% of articles, respectively; followed by epidemiology 11%, health service research 2% and neuroscience 0.7%. during the first five years of the mentioned period iran fell behind egypt in terms of international child and adolescent mental health research articles; however, in the last five years, iranian articles numbered 2.75 times the egyptian’s. conclusion: this study showed that it is feasible to outline the status of research activity of a country by using databases that cover publications and would yield several remarkable findings that could be used as a basis for policy making and strategy development in child and adolescent mental health research.