Iranian veterans’ health in published researches: a scientometric study

Background: The wars have several indirect effects on societies. The injured people, veterans, usually need lengthy care, often at great cost. Moreover, caring processes would get more complicated with aging. Therefore, several investigations have to be carried out in order to achieve an appropriate conception of planning the healthcare systems in Iran. The first step is to review the relevant studies on the veterans’ health. Method: On 31 December 2020, through a systematized search in the Scopus, as the largest abstract and citation database of peer reviewed publications, all published articles about veterans affiliated with at least an Iranian researcher as author were retrieved. Full records of retrieved articles, including, author name and affiliation, journal name, citation number, cited references, and keywords, were exported to a file. After data cleaning, the file was used for network analysis using the VOSviewer version 1.6.15. Results: : A total of 276 articles, about the Iranian veterans, were published. 31 articles of Iranian had received at least 31 to maximum 217 citation(H-index = 31). Baqiyatallah University of Medical Sciences and Mashhad University of Medical Sciences were respectively the most productive and cited university of Iran. The three major topics of researches about Iranian veterans’ health were psychological outcome, chemical warfare and mustard gas, and PTSD. Conclusion: However, published research about veterans’ health by Iranian research is growing in recent decade, number of publication is low and the topics studied is limited.