One of the essential tasks accelerate the decision-making process in mineral exploration projects is ranking anomalous areas.In this study,we used fourteen geologic maps (at scale 1∶100,000) in areas where systematic geochemical explorations were conducted in the Fariman-Kashmar axis in northeast Iran to conduct the anomaly ranking.On all these maps,samples were consistently prepared to be analyzed through statistical and geostatistical methods.At first,anomaly separation was carried out by fractal methods that resulted in the detection of 308 anomalous samples in 128 areas.These samples were classified into three groups of first,second,and thirdorder anomalies,whose number of anomalous samples were calculated based on this ranking technique.Three factors,including the average concentration of each anomaly,its surface area,and the number of its samples,were used to rank the areas.According to this technique,the maximum anomaly score obtained was 172 for the Taknar area,and the minimum score was 3 for several areas.To validate the ranking results,some exploration operations were carried out in some of these anomalous areas in which mining operations started later.Several significant gold anomalous areas were introduced,which is considered an important result of this study.