Citation Analysis of Iranian Demography Papers for Grouping the Effective Authors and for Determination of Emerging Fields

Purpose: The current research aims is citation analysis of papers that are published in the field of demography in Iran.
Methodology:  The research can be regarded as an applied one and is based on a scientometrics approach. The research population consists of the whole scientific productions in the field of demography in Iran. The citation analysis is based on the first author of papers.  Mapping the relationship between the cited authors was done through the Ravar-Matrix and UciNet as two software programs.
Findings: The findings show that the cited authors can be divided into three groups: reference authors, highly frequented, and rarely frequented. The reference authors are the well-known persons in the field of demography in Iran, like Zanjani, Mirzai, Abbassi, Kazemi-Pour, Sarai, Amani, and etc. The website of Iranian Statistics Center was the most cited resource by demographers.
Results: The Findings confirms the hypothesis that being cited is an indicator for scientific impact. The findings also show that the citation analysis is a way for determination of outstanding persons in the field of demography of Iran.