Preliminary Scientometric Study and Knowledge Mapping of Petroleum Engineering

Knowledge map is one of the major tools in scientometric studies, in addition to helping policymaking and planning the scientific system, leads to the discovery of the overall structure of knowledge, research operation evaluation, drawing the relations between different subject areas, and evaluation of the world’s scientific relations in that branch.The petroleum engineering knowledge is especially important in Iran due to the dependency of Iran’s economy on oil. Therefore, its scientometrics and, as a result, proper scientific policymaking will remarkably help enhancement its efficiency in higher education and industry.In this work, activity and its fields in the area of petroleum engineering in Iran and the world have been investigated and compared with a cross-field perspective using the co-citation method as well as data clustering and software analysis on the Scopus database. Subsequently, the structure of petroleum engineering has been drawn using the clustering method, and also, scientific relations among the world’s countries in the area of exploration studies and on that basis groundwork for policymaking in this scientific branch has been provided