Background and purpose: Publication of scientific journals in every country is recognized as one of the main ways for publishing and development of science and knowledge. The aim of this research was to compare the differences in non-citations of Iranian journals in Persian and English on health indexed in Scopus during 2011 and 2015.

Materials and methods: In a descriptive-analytical study, we investigated 85 Iranian journals in Persian and English on health indexed in Scopus database. The list of Journals was obtained from the Ministry of Health and all journals were searched in Scopus database. Data analysis was done in SPSS V.20 applying Mann-Whitney, t-test, and Pearson correlations. P values less than 0.05 were considered significant. 

Results: There was a weak positive correlation between Iranian journals in Persian and percentage of articles with at least one citation (r=0.4) which was found to be not significant (P=0.123). But in English language journals published by Iranian institutions and bodies a weak negative correlation (r=-0.388) was seen between the number of articles and percentage of articles with at least one citation (P=0.000).

Conclusion: According to SJR and SNIP, Iranian Journals in English indexed in Scopus have a better status compared with that of journals in Persian. Also, the number of articles with no citation published in English is low.