Iran’s scientific dominance and the emergence of South-East Asian countries as scientific collaborators in the Persian Gulf Region

A longitudinal bibliometric analysis of publications indexed in Thomson Reuters’ Incites and Elsevier’s Scopus, and published from Persian Gulf States and neighbouring Middle East countries, shows clear effects of major political events during the past 35 years. Predictions made in 2006 by the US diplomat Richard N. Haass on political changes in the Middle East have come true in the Gulf States’ national scientific research systems, to the extent that Iran has become in 2015 by far the leading country in the Persian Gulf, and South-East Asian countries including China, Malaysia and South Korea have become major scientific collaborators, displacing the USA and other large Western countries. But collaborations patterns among Persian Gulf States show no apparent relationship with differences in Islam denominations.