Abstract :
The aim of this article is to study factors that affect continuance and gaps or
transience in scientific activity of Iranian scholars. Scientific activity here is
considered as writing and publishing articles in ISI ranked journals. Email
interviews were conducted with a purposive sample of 48 scholars from the
fields of biotechnology, psychology, humanities, health policy & services,
aerial engineering, behavioral sciences, chemistry, and information science
in 2015. The chosen fields were mentioned as priority in the Iranian
scientific roadmap. The interviews were the qualitative phase of a mixedmethods study. The scholars were asked about the reasons for transience
and suggestions for increasing continuance in article writing. The interviews
revealed nine categories of factors causing gaps in the scientific works
including personal and family factors, internal and external motivating
factors, factors relating to work environment and facilities and the nature of
the field, factors relating to publishing process, and finally factors relating to
the knowledge of ISI journals. Interdisciplinary differences were found with
regard to these factors, and five groups of solutions were suggested by
interviewees for improving the continuance in authorship including
providing research requirements, motivating researchers, encouraging team
work, empowerment or enabling, and helping creativity or idea fostering.
