AUIQ award for Iraqi researchers: A strategic framework to foster research excellence and academic competitiveness across Iraqi institutions

This study presents an evaluation framework for the AUIQ Award 2025, initiated by Al-Ayen Iraqi University (AUIQ), to evaluate and recognize exceptional Iraqi researchers from universities and governmental research institutions. The award comprises two categories: the Senior Winner Award and the Top Researcher Award, both based on a set of scientific indicators reflecting research productivity, quality, impact, collaboration, and integrity. The evaluation included more than 700 researchers and employed a transparent, multidimensional scoring framework. The Senior Winner Award incorporated the H-index, total publications, publications in 2024, publications in the top 10% citation percentile, publications in the top 10% journal percentile, corresponding authorship, and international collaboration. A research-integrity penalty was also applied, with points deducted for each retracted publication. The Top Researcher Award incorporated additional impact indicators, including Field-Weighted Citation Impact (FWCI), overall citations, and citations per publication. All indicators were normalized using min–max scaling to facilitate comparisons across disciplines. For each indicator, the normalized score was calculated by subtracting the minimum observed value from the observed value and dividing the result by the range between the maximum and minimum values, producing scores between 0 and 1 before weighting. The final score was calculated as the weighted sum of the normalized indicators, followed by rescaling to facilitate interpretation. The results demonstrated substantial variation among researchers in research productivity, international collaboration, and citation impact. The highest-performing researchers combined strong publication productivity with high-quality journal publications, substantial citation impact, and international collaboration. The proposed scoring framework has strategic implications not only for recognizing research excellence but also for informing institutional research strategies and national research policy in Iraq. The framework may serve as a potential national model, subject to further pilot testing and validation across additional Iraqi institutions.