TEHRAN (Iran News) – Iran and China will allocate up to ¥2 million to support joint research projects, ISNA reported on Monday.
Under a cooperation agreement signed by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC) and Iran’s Natural Science Foundation (INSF), the two sides will jointly fund research projects in 2021 to help scientists and knowledge exchange between the two countries.
About 15 joint research projects are planned to be supported by 2021, with maximum funding of China’s 2 million yuan per project. Exchange costs are also part of the research budget and international cooperation that the INSF provides to Iranian scientists.
According to the information published on the website of the University of Tehran, this budget will be allocated to research projects in the fields of mathematics, life sciences, and materials sciences.
Iran’s significant contribution to world’s scientific growth
The share of Iranian articles with international participation has had significant growth of 209 percent during an eight-year period (2013-2020), becoming the Islamic world’s leading country in science diplomacy, according to the Scopus International Citation Database.
The number of articles indexed by the Iranian researchers on the Web of Science website in 2020 increased by 122 percent compared to that of 2013, which made Iran 16th in the world with 69,779 articles, and first among the Islamic countries for several consecutive years, Gholam Hossein Rahimi, deputy minister of science has said.
In November 2020, scientific studies and analyses extracted from the Scopus International Citation Database showed that the rate of scientific contributions of Iranian researchers to the world increased from 17 percent in 2011 to 31 percent in 2020, becoming the world’s leading country in science diplomacy with 14 percent growth.
The development of international scientific partnerships and diplomacy is one of the main policies of Iran, which is also emphasized by the country’s higher education system, Mohammad Javad Dehghani, head of the Islamic World Science Citation Center (ISC), said.
The share of the latest joint international scientific findings in the total scientific publications of the country is one of the most important indicators of scientific participation, he added.
