Past performance is not a indication for future results, don't you agree with that?
Performance of Iran in science and technology might improve drastically if sanctions removed, while on the other hand it might deteriorate significantly if war breaks out. And ranking of a country in terms of paper published is not a right way to judge a country's performance in terms of science. Research impact and significance of the research can't be ruled out, where western countries leads by a huge margin than us, because of their state of the art research laboratories and brains behind the research. Even the college i'm from gets about 800 publications per year, doesn't mean that all are top class.
Hope you get my point.
I do get your point my friend, but if that's the case, then no future prediction is possible. It's impossible to predict the future, so what you're saying is more than obvious, but if the situation remains the same, mathematically they predict that this will happen. Because they predict it it doesn't mean that this will happen, but if everything remains fine or close to the current situation, then with a reasonable error, this prediction will happen. Now if something happens that totally changes the hypotheses used in these predictions, no one expects these predictions to come out true.
I disagree with you. While USA, UK, Germany, France, and many other European countries are way ahead of us in quality of research and production, I disagree that all of them are ahead of us by a huge margin. You could simply compare Iran by a country like Belgium, as someone pointed out, and see that Iran is ahead of Belgium in almost all areas. Mathematics, Medicine, Physics, etc. The problem is that some people are conditioned to reject any progress of Iran as propaganda, like even in this case where the reports have been published by independent researchers. When a scientific progress is claimed by Iran, it's automatically rejected by many pro-West people as state propaganda for local consumption, with this mentality you'll always underestimate Iran while in fact Iran is doing pretty well now. We're sanctioned like hell, almost every high-tech piece is not sent to Iran because they label it 'dual purpose' (see how unfair it is because many things could be considered dual purpose even if they are not), yet we're growing pretty well. We're already ahead of many, I repeat, many European states both in quality and quantity, you could not believe it if you don't want, but then it's your opinion and you could keep it to your own instead of insisting on it with no evidence to back up your opinion.
Also, many of these sanctions have actually helped Iran. Iranians produced STM on their own around 5-10 years ago because no one else sold it to us and we needed them badly for our nanotechnology. If they remove these sanctions surely it'll be better for us, because we can do more cooperation with foreign universities and that would also have an impact on our citation and H-Index, but even if they don't, we won't give up, we'll try harder to compensate.
