Sosyal Bilim Tezlerinin Atıf Analizi

Abstract

Scholarly communication is very much related with characteristics of the given discipline. The aim of this study is to stress the characteristics of the scholarly communication in social sciences. For this purpose, first of all a total number of 128 theses (87 master’s and 41 PhD) have been selected. These theses, submitted between 1968-2007, are chosen according to their year of submission and their layered sampling ratio among the disciplines of sociology, psychology, history, economics, philosophy, and English language and literature. In addition, an analysis of 15,970 citations in these theses has been made according to their total page number, date, type, medium, language, and number of authors. According to the findings, it has been evaluated whether the citations vary according to disciplines, the sources that are being cited alter in time, there is a considerable rate of obsolescence, and there are differences between master’s and PhD theses in terms of their citation characteristics. In order to save the data, a relevant database has been designed. The data acquired has been evaluated by Microsoft Excel and Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (SPSS) softwares. This study concludes that there is a correlation among the number of citations, the degree of theses, and the number of pages; book is the most cited source, whereas journal is the second in social sciences, while the usage of other sources remain low; the most cited sources are Turkish; the half-life of the cited sources is 14 years; and finally the use of single-authored sources is very high. In addition, these given six disciplines of social sciences differ according to their citation characteristics. The most book-citing disciplines are philosophy and English language and literature; while the most journal-user disciplines are psychology and economics. The fastest literature obsolescence is seen in psychology; on the other hand, it is the slowest in history. In terms of language the most intense use of English sources is seen in psychology. In other disciplines Turkish sources are widely used and philosophy is a discipline in which the language variety is high. In the beginning of our study the relevant literature has been introduced and it has been found out that the previous findings in the literature and those of ours are overlapping.