Monitoring Global Science of Petroleum Engineering Based on Co-citation Analysis Networks

The development of purposeful and principled programs meant to improve the scientific level of countries requires the assessment and measurement of research, and oil industry research is no exception. Therefore, examining the quantitative and qualitative growth trend of products in petroleum engineering can be a guideline for decision-makers and politicians to develop and advance this field. This research is a scientometric study conducted using the co-citation analysis technique. The statistical population of the present study includes all articles in the field of petroleum engineering indexed in the Web of Science database from January 1, 1985, to December 31, 2019. All full record and cited references with tagged format were marked as plain text files to performing analysis. Ravar PreMap, UCINET and NetDraw software were used to identify countries and researchers in question and do a co-citation study. The annual growth trend of articles in petroleum engineering has had an upward trend between 1985 and 2019. Finally, by examining the research in this area, it was found that based on centrality indices, "BAHADORI, ALIREZA" from New South Wales Oil and Gas Company of Australia and "MOHAMMADI, AMIR H." from the University of KwaZulu-Natal in South Africa have played a more important role in scientific production in the field of petroleum engineering according to rank and intermediate centrality indices. Co-citation analysis of articles can show the most important articles and their relationships. Such analyses can be useful for large-scale policymaking or identifying existing gaps and addressing them.