Research performance of higher education institutions in Türkiye: 1980–2022

Abstract

In recent years, there has been a growing interest in the measurement of research performance. These studies evaluate a country or groups of countries according to their research performance and make some inferences to improve their performance. This study analyses the research performance of Turkish higher education, which aims for higher positions in international rankings, in the context of publication productivity, impact and collaboration with data based on Web of Science and comprehensive indicators for the years 1980–2022. In addition, research area-based analyses were also made. In this way, by presenting Türkiye’s performance from past to present in a comprehensive manner, rich information has been provided to policy makers, decision makers, and practical implications have been made for the improvement of performance. According to the results of the study, Türkiye has been faced with low productivity for many years. Both the area-based analyses and the results for the overall publication impact revealed that although there has been an increase in publication impact in recent years, Türkiye’s publication impact has performed below the world average in all years examined. The results indicated that Turkish higher education has some problems in terms of quality. As for research collaboration, the results showed that Türkiye gives more importance to domestic collaborative publications rather than international collaboration, while industry collaboration continues to remain in the background. Based on the results of the study, practical implications for policy makers and decision makers were made.