RETRACTED ARTICLE: The role of the Islamic Azad University in science production of Iran: from the past to the future

In this research, a method has been presented to predict the science production share of the Islamic Azad University in Iran at the end of 2017 and 2025 by artificial neural networks and adaptive network-based fuzzy inference systems. The used data were scientific publications under affiliations entitled “Azad University” or “University of Azad” gathered from Scopus databases. To build the model for training, testing and validation the network, scientific researches of the recent 24 years were extracted and used as inputs. The output of the obtained models was the science production share of the Islamic Azad University in scientific research of Iran. The built models showed an excellent potential to predict the science production share of the Islamic Azad University. A good fit equation that correlates the science production share of the Islamic Azad University in Iran to its number of publication at a specific year was presented. By extrapolation method, the scientific share of the Islamic Azad University among all of the Iranian’s scientific institutions was predicted equal to about 50 and 78% at the years 2017 and 2025, respectively.