Sharif Digital Repository

The proliferation of predatory or bogus journals has been recognized as a threat to academic research, and this study was conducted to discover the experiences of authors published in these journals. Eighty authors who had published in journals identified as predatory were surveyed. We asked how the authors learnt about these journals, what they thought about the reputation of the journals, their experiences of peer review and the quality of feedback provided, and whether publication was driven by PhD or job requirements. Our results showed that a third of authors discovered the journals by web searches or responding to email invitations. Over half said the reputation and name of the journal... 

This paper examines the effect of experiencing a research collaboration between African scientists and their international partners on the African scientists' research impact, measured by scores based on the number of citations and journal impact factor. Using a difference-in-difference regression analysis on publication data of African scientists, the results show that international research collaboration in a given year has a positive and significant effect on research impact, which lasts in the subsequent years. The presence of such permanent effect suggests a sort of 'permanent learning by international collaboration'. The positive effect of international collaboration on research... 

An up-to-date progress of the international laser research and development is given in this article. The number of scientific publications and filed patents are considered as a figure of merit and based on these numbers the growth pace and important aspects are investigated. We have used the Science Finder Scholar search engine, which indexes more than 4000 journals, in different languages, and represents most significant published materials in laser science and engineering. The growth of the laser and related fields are described in terms of resulting scientific publications for the period of 1990-2003. The share of top nations in scientific publications, and in particular laser... 

Progress of carbon nanotube (CNT) research and development in terms of published papers and patents is reported. Developments concerning CNT structures, synthesis, and major parameters, in terms of the published documents are surveyed. Publication growth of CNTs and related fields are analyzed for the period of 2000-2010. From the explored search term, "carbon nanotubes", the total number of papers containing the CNT concept is 52,224, and for patents is 5,746, with a patent/paper ratio of 0.11. For CNT research in the given period, an annual increase of 8.09% for paper and 8.68% for patents are resulted. Published papers for CNT, CVD and CCVD synthesis parameters for the period of 2000-2010... 

This study presents an up to date progress of the national and international laser research and developments. The number of scientific publications and accepted patents are considered as a figure of merit and based on these numbers the growth pace for the period of 1990-2003 is investigated. The share of top nations in scientific publications and in particular laser publications in term of their Gross Domestic Product (GDP) is presented. Four countries including the USA, Japan, Germany and China have a laser publication contribution of 58.9% while the rest of the world including (189) countries contribute 41.1%. However, for the case of accepted patents, which are the more important factor,... 

Privacy preservation is an important issue in data publishing. Existing approaches on privacy-preserving data publishing rely on tabular anonymization techniques such as k-anonymity, which do not provide appropriate results for aggregate queries. The solutions based on graph anonymization have also been proposed for relational data to hide only bipartite relations. In this paper, we propose an approach for anonymizing multirelation constraints (ternary or more) with (t,k) hypergraph anonymization in data publishing. To this end, we model constraints as undirected hypergraphs and formally cluster attribute relations as hyperedge with the t-means-clustering algorithm. In addition,... 

This article has been retracted: please see Elsevier Policy on Article Withdrawal (https://www.elsevier.com/about/our-business/policies/article-withdrawal). This article has been retracted at the request of the Editor-in-Chief. Concern has been raised about the identity of the author “David Ross” as the listed institution has denied the affiliation of a person with this name. Further inquiry revealed that the names of the co-authors were added to the revised version of the article without notifying the handling Editor, which is contrary to the journal policy on changes to authorship. Also, the co-authors were not able to provide a reasonable description of their contribution to the article....