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Institutional changes, in a historical context, through simultaneous evolutionary and metamorphic processes either deform or reform long-enduring institutions. The chapter delves into the Persian history from the early days of the reign of Nāṣer al-Dīn Shāh-e Qājār in 1848 to the recent years and traces Persian institutions' historical transformations, which culminated to the Persian women entrepreneurship. Thus, the chapter first sets the historical context in each period and then sheds light on the pivotal issues of each period's women. The undergirding base of the discussions is the assumption of the change in institutions as natural metamorphosis in the animate. Finally, the discussions contribute to the conceptualization of the Institutional Triangulation and in the case of Persia, a cultural-driven triangulation, which has paved the way to the formation of a stupendously hegemonic patriarchal and masculine sociopolitical economy in Persia, that has historically affected women's institutionalization, subjugation, subordination, marginalization, socialization, emancipation, and most recently Islamization phases.

The main objective of this study is to evaluate the impact of Persian Scientific Papers (PSPs) on Persian Wikipedia by studying Wikipedia's citations to these papers.

The present study is applied research, which has been performed by the web-mining method, such as downloading web pages, extracting information (references), identifying papers, detecting peer-review journals and calculating the frequency rates. The statistical population included 10,000 Persian Wikipedia Pages (PWPs) that were analyzed in two rounds with a six-month interval.

The number of pages containing the Persian references section was 3,994 and 4,063 out of the 10,000 pages extracted in the first and second rounds. The ratio of pages that cited scientific sources (58 and 67 pages) to the pages extracted from the PWP was equal to 0.58 and 0.67%. The ratio of pages that cited scientific sources to pages with Persian references in each round was equal to 1.45 and 1.64%. The number of references extracted from the PWP in each round equaled 30,441 and 35,891. Eight titles from reputable Persian journals had received at least three citations from Wikipedia.

The present study has determined the extent of interaction between science and society (knowledge flow) in the form of citations from Wikipedia articles to articles in peer-reviewed journals. The study of this issue in Persian Wikipedia in more than 2000 Persian peer-reviewed journals shows the originality of the present paper. Studying citation reliability in a collaborative and openly editable platform is another originality of the work.

The purpose of this paper is to evaluate the protective effects of Persian gum and gum Arabic on the survival of Lactobacillus plantarum subsp. plantarum PTCC 1896, Escherichia coli, Xanthomonas axonopodis, and Saccharomyces cerevisiae during freeze drying.

Cultures were harvested from the early stationary phase and enumerated after dilution according to the Milse Misra method. Bacterial suspensions were mixed with protective agents and frozen at –80°C before drying in a freeze dryer. Survival rates were determined both immediately during freeze drying and after 14 days of cold storage (at 4°C).

Compared to gum Arabic 5 and 10 percent (W/V) or skim milk 10 percent (W/V), Persian gum 1 percent (W/V) showed no significantly different effects on the survival of Lactobacillus plantarum subsp. plantarum PTCC 1896 (p<0.05). Similarly, no significant differences (p<0.05) were observed between Persian gum 6 percent (W/V), gum Arabic 6 percent (W/V), the combination of Persian gum 3 percent (W/V) and gum Arabic 3 percent (W/V), and skim milk 10 percent (W/V) in terms of their effects on the survival of Escherichia coli. Skim milk 10 percent (W/V) was, however, found to have significant (p<0.05) effects on the survival of Xanthomonas axonopodis and Saccharomyces cerevisiae. Statistically significant (p<0.05) effects were observed after 14 days of cold storage (4°C) by Persian gum 6 percent (W/V) on the survival of Escherichia coli and by gum Arabic 6 percent (W/V) on the survival of Xanthomonas axonopodis and Saccharomyces cerevisiae. It was concluded that protective agents could be replaced by Persian gum for its effect on the survival rate of Escherichia coli and by skim milk for its effects on the survival of Xanthomonas axonopodis and Saccharomyces cerevisiae. Persian gum 6 percent (W/V) seemed to be the best protective agent for Escherichia coli during 14 days of its storage as gum Arabic 6 percent (W/V) seemed to have the same performance for Xanthomonas axonopodis and Saccharomyces cerevisiae. Persian gum 1 percent (W/V) was also found an alternative protective agent for the freeze drying of Lactobacillus plantarum subsp. plantarum PTCC 1896.

As Iranian Persian gum is cheap due to its wide availability and seems to have effects similar to those of gum Arabic and skim milk at low concentrations, it may be considered a good candidate for industrial applications.

This paper takes the stance that there are two criteria for evaluation of diversity in organizations. These criteria are (a) competition with other organizations and (b) the maintenance of the organization across time. Organizations which seek diversity without considering its effects on competitive and maintenance goals place themselves at a disadvantage vis‐a‐vis their competitors. Two case examples, the Persian and Roman Empires, are used to show how different diversity management practices affect organizations. Differences between the two empires are related to the degree to which they allowed for inclusion of diverse cultural groups. The Persian Empire was exclusionary. The Roman Empire was inclusionary. Roman inclusionary practices were based on merit. Inclusion by merit is shown to lead to increased organizational effectiveness primarily in terms of increased organizational resiliency across time.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate image search and retrieval problems in selected search engines in relation to Persian writing style challenges.

This study is an applied one, and to answer the questions the authors used an evaluative research method. The aim of the research is to explore the morphological and semantic problems of Persian language in connection with image search and retrieval among the three major and widespread search engines: Google, Yahoo and Bing. In order to collect the data, a checklist designed by the researcher was used and then the data were analyzed by descriptive and inferential statistics.

The results indicate that Google, Yahoo and Bing search engines do not pay enough attention to morphological and semantic features of Persian language in image search and retrieval. This research reveals that six groups of Persian language features include derived words, derived/compound words, Persian and Arabic Plural words, use of dotted T and the use of spoken language and polysemy, which are the major problems in this area. In addition, the results suggest that Google is the best search engine of all in terms of compatibility with Persian language features.

This study investigated some new aspects of the above-mentioned subject through combining morphological and semantic aspects of Persian language with image search and retrieval. Therefore, this study is an interdisciplinary research, the results of which would help both to offer some solutions and to carry out similar research on this subject area. This study will also fill a gap in research studies conducted so far in this area in Farsi language, especially in image search and retrieval. Moreover, findings of this study can help to bridge the gap between the user’s questions and search engines (systems) retrievals. In addition, the methodology of this paper provides a framework for further research on image search and retrieval in databases and search engines.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate how Wikipedians are motivated, or discouraged, to contribute to Farsi (Persian) Wikipedia.

In this grounded theory study, face‐to‐face semi‐structured interviews were conducted with a sample of 15 active users of Persian Wikipedia. The interviews then were transcribed and coded using Strauss and Corbin's method which included constant comparison of data.

Editing and writing incentives, as well as deterrents, were extracted from the data. Findings indicated that motivating factors can be classified into two categories of internal and external. Internal motivations could be individual or cognitive motivations or be related to Wikipedia structure. Also, some factors such as permanent access to the internet can be considered as external motivations for contribution to Wikipedia. On the other hand, content production and improvement of Wikipedia in local language was the strongest reason for contribution; entertainment was the weakest motivation. Positive feedback from other users can be the strongest factor that encourages users to stay in Wikipedia and continue their contribution.

This is the first study on Persian Wikipedia and one of the few qualitative studies on Wikipedia. It proposes a new categorization of encouraging and discouraging factors for Wikipedians.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the validity and reliability of the Persian version of the patient satisfaction questionnaire (PVPSQ). The study addressed the communication skills section of the PSQ specifically.

This cross-sectional study was conducted in 2015 to determine the validity and reliability of the Persian version of the patient satisfaction questionnaire (PSQ). In total, 538 patients (ten in pilot, 488 in tests, 40 in retest), 14 experts and 198 residents participated. The items’ impact score, content validity index, and content validity ratio were calculated. Construct validity and reliability of the scale were examined with exploratory factor analysis, Cronbach’s α, and the Intraclass correlation coefficient (ICC), respectively.

The questionnaire demonstrated a content validity index=0.94, content validity ratio=0.84, impact score=4.61, Cronbach’s α=0.93 and ICC=0.513 (p<0.00). A single factor was found in the eigenvalue distribution of the PSQ that predicted approximately 93 percent of the variance.

The results of this study will permit researchers in all Persian-speaking countries to use a valid and reliable Persian version of the PSQ to evaluate patients’ satisfaction with residents’ communication skills.

There were a few Persian questionnaires to assess patient satisfaction with physicians’ communication skills, but their psychometric properties had not been reported until the time of this study. By using the PVPSQ, both researchers at Iranian universities of medical sciences and researchers in other Persian-speaking countries can assess residents’ communication skills from the patient’s perspective more reliably.

In an effort to bridge the gap between applying translation corpora, specialized terminology teaching and translation performance of undergraduate students, the purpose of this paper is to investigate the possible impacts of teaching specialized terminology of law as a specific area of inquiry on translation performance of Iranian undergraduate translation student (English–Persian language pairs). The null hypothesis of this study is that using specialized terminology does not have statistically significant impacts on the translation performance of the translation students.

The design of this research was experimental in that there was pretest, treatment, posttest and random sampling. In other words, this research was pre-experimental one-group pretest-posttest design. This design was used in this research as the number of subjects who participated in the research was limited. Apart from being experimental, this research enjoyed a corpus-based perspective. As Mcenery and Hardie (2012) claim, corpus-based research uses the “corpus data in order to explore a theory or hypothesis, typically one established in the current literature, in order to validate it, refute it or refine it” (p. 6). Table I shows the design of this research.

The results of this research indicated that on the whole, the posttest results had statistically significant differences with that of the pretest. In this regard, the quality of students’ translation enhanced after using the specialized terminology in the form of three types of corpora. Indeed, there was a general trend in the improved quality of the novice translators in translating specialized and subject-field terminologies in an English–Persian context.

This paper is original in that it probes into one of the less researched areas of Translation Studies Research and employs corpora methodology.

The purpose of this paper is to provide a general review and historical context for digitization and interdisciplinary research involving digital surrogates of historical Persian manuscripts in the National Library and Archives of Iran and similarly engaged institutions.

The paper explores interdisciplinary aspects of Persian art, poetry, science, and philosophy, as revealed in the scrutiny of digitized manuscripts. It explores the enhancement of Persian, Iranian and Islamic cultural heritage research. It discusses benefits and concerns in conceptual contexts of library and information science literature. It references some manuscript digitization projects involving Islamic heritage, including the HARAM online manuscript service of the National Library and Archives of Iran (NLAI). It addresses issues of availability and access in global contexts.

Manuscript digitization, placed in the context of interdisciplinary research, reveals modern correlations to the interdisciplinary nature of ancient Persian arts and sciences — and to the purpose of digitization — as appropriate to an historical continuum of Persian written literacy and traditional Islamic cultural heritage.

For future contexts of digital global research, research involving many interrelated fields will benefit from use of digital manuscript surrogates. Institutional cooperation will be necessary. The physical conservation of fragile materials also benefits. Historical contexts should be observed, and preserved with the materials.

This paper shows that interdisciplinary research in international universities, libraries, museums, archives, government agencies, and other public institutions uniquely benefits from access to digitized manuscripts. It provides contexts for solving problems of physical manuscript decay and destruction.

The purpose of this paper (experimental–comparative research) is to investigate the possible impacts of explicit and implicit teaching Persian structures and editing methods on the translation performance of the Iranian undergraduate translation students.

This research enjoyed a quasi-experimental design. A quasi-experimental research design was used in this research, as it was impossible to assign random sampling to the subjects. In addition, this research was a comparative group study as there were two experimental groups with two different treatments and one control group with placebo. Table I represents the design of the research.

The results showed that before the treatment there were no significant differences between three groups in terms of translation performance; however, after treatment, the results indicated a statistically significant difference between two experimental groups and treatment group. Moreover, explicit instruction yielded more positive results than the implicit group.

Although research in the field of translation assessment and quality in relation to target language are prevalent and in spite of the abundance of research in the field of implicit/explicit instructions in second language teaching and learning, there is no research (to the best knowledge of authors) which looks at translation performance from teaching structures and editing methods of target language perspective with the focus of explicit and implicit (in an English–Persian context).