Türkiye'nin Bilimsel Yayınlarının Sosyal Ağ Analizi Yöntemiyle Değerlendirilmesi

Abstract

Scientists publish their studies in order to announce the research results to a wide audience. The impact of published works is measured and examined qualitatively by bibliometric methods. By means of research evaluation studies, publication tendencies of specific fields are revealed, comparisons are made between countries, institutions or individuals, and consequently all these efforts help the formation of scientific publication policies of countries and institutions. Research evaluation studies also provide information on what is worth researching for the scientists and whatis valuable for the academia.The aim of this project is to examine Turkey’s scientific publications in the citation indexes in terms of their bibliometric features to reveal the relationships among the authors, institutions and countries by using the social network analysis method. Social network analysis is used by several disciplines to examine the relationships of communities, to describe their network structures and to visualise and model the existing nodes which cannot be observed with the naked eye. In this project, Turkey’s partners in producing scientific publications, institutional co-operations, commonly cited journals were also investigated.The research started by obtaining Turkey addressed publications from the Science Citation Index Expanded, Social Sciences Citation Indexand Arts & Humanities Citation Indexdatabases of Web of Knowledge. An extensive data cleaning process was performed on the obtained data in order to be able to make reliable evaluations.In this data cleaning process somefields, such as address, publication date, publication type, of almost 200,000 records were verified by different techniques.The data cleaning process is an obligation in such projects to be able to achieve accurate results and it takes considerable time. In our study different softwares were used and several macros were produced in order to correct errors generated from the databases. It is also important to perform a visual inspection along with the computer based examinations to be able to detect the possible errors and create a proper and accurate data set. Therefore the project staff spent most of their times for checking and creating this correct database.This project contains the most comprehensive analysis results which target Turkey’s scientificpublications within the international literature. Studies that used the citation indexes as their data sets usually perform superficial evaluations. With this study, Turkey’s tendency for the process of producing scientific publications and the scientificcommunication with other disciplines were investigated longitudinally. The findings of this project will help the decision makers to take informed decisions on scientific publication policy.