The importance of international and national publications for promotion and the impact of recruitment policies

Few studies explored whether publications in international peer-reviewed journals and publications in national journals, so-called local publications, affect academic promotion and whether their impact varies for different categories of scientists. Moreover, recruitment policies have mostly tried to incentivize international publications, but in recent years, some countries have promoted publications in national outlets, and the impact of such policies has not been explored. The goal of this article is to address these gaps considering all active Turkish full professors in Business and Economics (n = 1470) and the factors affecting the time to promotion. We found that international publications and, to a lesser extent, local publications predict significantly faster promotion, but with very different impact across categories of scientists. Moreover, local articles’ impact on time-to-promotion increased after the introduction of new regulations that encouraged publication in national journals, whereas international publications became completely irrelevant.