  A longitudinal bibliometric analysis of publications indexed in Thomson
Reuters' Incites and Elsevier's Scopus, and published from Persian Gulf States
and neighbouring Middle East countries, shows clear effects of major political
events during the past 35 years. Predictions made in 2006 by the US diplomat
Richard N. Haass on political changes in the Middle East have come true in the
Gulf States' national scientific research systems, to the extent that Iran has
become in 2015 by far the leading country in the Persian Gulf, and South-East
Asian countries including China, Malaysia and South Korea have become major
scientific collaborators, displacing the USA and other large Western countries.
But collaborations patterns among Persian Gulf States show no apparent
relationship with differences in Islam denominations.
