Abstract
The main purpose of this study is to gain insight about scientific productivity and cooperation among Turkish language speaking countries in today’s conditions in which scientific cooperation has gained ever-increasing significance. The basic problematic of the current research is as follows: although scientific production and cooperation has gained a strategic importance and bibliometric studies have become popular on scientific production processes with reference to the number of academic publications and citations, academic studies on this field have not been carried out yet in Turkish language speaking countries. In the current study, a bibliometric analysis was done with reference to co-authored scientific documents and citations between 2000 and 2016 years in the countries being a member of “Turkic Council” which is one of the main international organizations aiming to institutionalize scientific cooperation in Turkic world. In the analyses obtained from Web of Science, the following phenomena were highlighted the number of academic documents, the number of citations, the number of academic documents per academic staff, the number of academic documents per institutions, the impact factors of the studies, the main research fields, the number of co-authored academic studies which the member countries carried out together and with the other countries and finally the languages used in these academic studies. The basic research question in the present research focuses on what kind of evolution appeared in the number of academic documents, their impact factors, co-authoring matter and their main research fields in Turkic Council member countries. The essential findings of this interdisciplinary study in which scientific research statistics of the member countries are presented in analyses along with geopolitical descriptions can be listed as follows; Turkey is the main research partner of Turkic Council member countries, Turkey has still kept its preliminary role in the process of scientific cooperation in Turkic world together with the end of the cold war, the other member countries except for Turkey have fallen behind considerably in the rank of publication and citation performance, the scientific cooperation among other member countries has not been activated yet despite the institutional moves of the Council, the use of Turkish language in the examined documents is rather scarce although Turkey occupies the scientific preliminary position and the Council is an international organization which is shaped under the framework of common language axis.
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This transformation process, which started to be felt from the last quarter of the twentieth century, is mostly expressed by the concept of "globalization" (Giddens 2000; Sahin 2009). Characteristic of this process include; increasing scientific cooperation, knowledge being the main source of power, and facilitating access to information also result in interpretations that humanity is moving from the industrial society to the information society (Toffler 1980; Drucker 2002).
Henceforward, ever-increasing international scientific institutions are mentioned while talking about international organizations. European Research Area (ERA), CERN which is connected to UNESCO, International Council for Science (ICSU), European Center for Higher Education (UNESCO-CEPES) and European Universities Association (EUA) are the first examples that comes to mind at this point.. (Even, it is possible to add databases such as Web of Science and Scopus to this list).
This progress can also be stated as the popularization of Schumpeterian approach which makes innovation, trains talents and provides the mobility of talents in new conditions shaped by globalization (Agion and Akçiğit 2014). Starting from this point of view, it is also possible to conclude that; to advocate the development in today's structural conditions and the scientific production connection is getting stronger and it can be foreseen that the countries, which cannot make innovations in a globalized world and fail to increase and share scientific talents, are doomed to depend on the others more (Sahin 2016; Agion and Akçiğit 2014).
Some global developments such as ongoing geopolitical uncertainties which broke up after the cold war, ever-increasing ethno-cultural tension, environmental problems threating the whole globe on a largescale, perpetual risk of global economic risk, awry economic globalization, internationalization of many crime types such as terrorism indicated that countries cannot cope with these problems alone. Moreover, this situation enables the foresight that international cooperation and information sharing will increasingly gain importance in science and technology areas.
As an evidence of this situation, it needs to be reminded that Turkey became the 18th country with 204.216 publications in the rank of scientific publication production between 2010 and 2015. 36.0007 of these 204.216 publications (17.63%) were produced with the help of international cooperation (ULAKBIM 2017). Another concrete data is that Turkey was the 28th of 151 countries in the rank of scientific citations in 2017 according to Incites.
Turkey is among the countries having large-scale periphery. Turkey has a periphery stretching from Balkans to Middle East, from Ural region to Central Asia. Actually, it is possible to mention about the line stretching from Balkans to West China as the real center of geopolitical concept or periphery in terms of having strong ethnical and historical connection with Turkey (Fuller and Lesser 1993; Dugin 1997). This line has been widely called “Turkic World” since the end of the cold war period.
According to the data obtained from Turkish Council of Higher Education, the number of academics and students visiting Turkey from Turkic countries has gradually increased. The same data also indicates that 363 of 3.550 foreign academics in Turkey in 2017 are the citizens of Turkic Republics. Besides, a considerable number of academics among 6.000 foreigners applying for teaching positions in Turkey come from Turkic countries. Once the number of international students in Turkey in 2017 is examined, it is seen that there are totally 103.727 international students living in Turkey. Compared to the last decade, the number of international students increased 17 times, and there also appeared 182% increase in the number of international students in the last 5 years. It needs to be keynoted that most of these students come from Turkic world. In the rank of student numbers living in Turkey, Azerbaijan is on the top (15.036 students) and then Turkmenistan appears (10.642 students). While Kyrgyzstan is the third, Kazakhstan is the seventh in this ranking (YOK 2017a).
Parallel to the foundation of “Turkic Universities Association”, Council of Higher Education in Turkey established “Mevlana Exchange Program” in 2013-2014 academic term in order to make Turkey a center of attraction in terms of science. This program was set up for the exchange of academics and students coming from the countries which are excluded from “Erasmus Exchange Program” (YOK 2017b: 1–3). Mevlana Exchange Program can be regarded as an important project in terms of accelerating scientific cooperation in the region when we take the sincere affairs between Turkic Republics and Turkey into account since 1992.
Both in the process of forming scientific cooperation policies and expressing scientific cooperation structures, the preliminary factors can be listed as follows; special goals designated in the context of education and technology policies, international cycle and cultural elements (Gossart and Ozman 2009).
As seen in Table 1; between 2000 and 2016, Turkish Council member countries’ total number of documents, indexed in the WoS Databases is slightly less than Scopus. It should also be noted that there is a constant incidence of divergence in documents and citations in WoS and Scopus, two of the most comprehensive data bases at this point (Bar-İlan 2008). It can be shown that this situation is mainly due to the fact that the scope of the scientific document indexed by Scopus is larger (Scopus has a larger data set). To give an example; at the beginning of May 2017 Scopus had 67.7 million Documents, Web of Science Core Collection had 65.6 million Documents (Chadegani et al. 2013; Kotsemir and Shashnov 2017).
Similar analyzes have been conducted for both Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan, taking WoS documents which were co-authored by two scientists into consideration. The results of the analysis on the highest ranking institutes where academics from Turkey and Kazakhstan co-authored documents reveals that among the 20 highest ranking higher education institutes, thirteen is from Turkey. The results of the analysis on the highest ranking institutes where academics from Turkey and Kyrgyzstan co-authored documents reveals that among the 20 highest ranking higher education institutes, six is from Turkey.
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Appendix 1: Bilateral co-authorship per years in detail
Appendix 1: Bilateral co-authorship per years in detail
Country | 2000 | 2001 | 2002 | 2003 | 2004 | 2005 | 2006 | 2007 | 2008 | 2009 | 2010 | 2011 | 2012 | 2013 | 2014 | 2015 | 2016 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Turk–Azeri | 19 | 22 | 47 | 58 | 68 | 60 | 65 | 71 | 82 | 83 | 112 | 153 | 209 | 163 | 175 | 253 | 290 |
Turk–Kazakh | 1 | 3 | 2 | 7 | 2 | 3 | 8 | 10 | 5 | 6 | 11 | 19 | 18 | 41 | 70 | 94 | 84 |
Turk–Kyrgyz | 1 | 2 | 0 | 1 | 4 | 5 | 4 | 5 | 5 | 7 | 3 | 17 | 24 | 27 | 25 | 28 | 41 |
Azeri–Kazakh | 1 | 0 | 1 | 1 | 0 | 2 | 3 | 0 | 5 | 1 | 0 | 4 | 2 | 3 | 3 | 11 | 8 |
Azeri–Kyrgyz | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 1 | 1 | 0 | 1 | 1 | 0 | 1 | 0 | 0 | 2 | 1 | 5 |
Kyrgyz–Kazakh | 1 | 3 | 0 | 1 | 1 | 5 | 5 | 4 | 9 | 7 | 6 | 6 | 5 | 10 | 18 | 17 | 6 |
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Şahin, K., Candan, G. Scientific productivity and cooperation in Turkic world: a bibliometric analysis. Scientometrics 115, 1199–1229 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-018-2730-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-018-2730-x