Bibliometric Analysis of the Turkish Doctoral Dissertations: A Case Study of Economy, Law, Psychology, Political Science, and International Relations Disciplines

This study aims to analyze the contributions of the doctoral dissertations completed in the disciplines of economy, law, psychology, political science, and international relations to the literature and practice through the citations to the articles extracted from these dissertations using bibliometric analysis. These disciplines were included in the present study as they were determined as the priority ones in the training of the human resources by the Turkish Council of Higher Education (CoHE). 88 dissertations were reached in the National Thesis Center database of CoHE in 2018 and subjected to document analysis. The published scientific studies based on these dissertations were primarily searched within authors’ websites, CoHE Academic, Web of Science, ScienceDirect, Education Resources Information Center, ResearchGate and Google Scholar. No data could be found for 61 dissertations out of 88 ones. The citations to the articles derived from 17 dissertations, which were searched in Google Scholar, ResearchGate, SCOPUS, SOBIAD and Web of Science databases were bibliometrically analyzed. Only 9 dissertations were cited. While the primary data were used in the dissertations completed in the discipline of psychology, the secondary data were mostly used in the other dissertations. These results indicate that the contribution of the dissertations to the literature and practice is quite limited. Thus, the researchers turned their attention to the contribution of the dissertations produced in other disciplines in the field of social sciences. Several suggestions (e.g. developing researchers’ research skills, studying priority research topics in the Turkish context) were also made to increase the contribution of the dissertations to the literature and practice.