A Scientometric Profile of Social Sciences Research in Turkey

Abstract

I surveyed the social sciences journal literature for the decade period 1987-1996 looking for papers with authors, or at least one co-author giving an address from an institution in Turkey. The number of such papers had nearly tripled from 1987 to 1996. I found that the papers are scattered into 341 journals and almost one third of all papers went to nine journals, each of which contained an average of a least one Turkish paper per year. Only two of these journals, on archaeology and anthropology, happened to be of high citation impact.Psychology and psychiatry, combined with business and economics are found to be the most productive subjects accounting for about half of the publication output. A vast majority of the papers were articles in English, and in an average article contained about 24 bibliographic references. The number of Turkish papers in nine major journals are somewhat correlated with their availability in local libraries. The number of co-authors per paper had nearly doubled over the period surveyed, reflecting increased interaction among scientists. About half of the authors were affiliated with three universities in Ankara and Istanbul, indicating a heavier concentration of social sciences research in the main metropoles of the country.

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