Scientific impact of the Turkish educational dissertations

Abstract

This study investigates the impact of the Turkish educational dissertations through the scientific impact criterion dealing with the scientific publications extracted from the dissertations in peer-reviewed indexed journals and their citation counts. 124 dissertations completed in 12 Turkish public universities between 2014 and 2017 were selected through criterion sampling. Authors’ websites, ERIC, Google Scholar, Researchgate, ScienceDirect and Web of Science databases were scanned to identify the scientific publications extracted from the dissertations, whereas Google Scholar, Researchgate and Web of Science databases were searched to determine their citation counts. 64 scientific publications were extracted from 124 dissertations, no information was found for 60 dissertations. Furthermore, only 34 of 64 scientific publications were cited and the total number of citations was 115. Since most of these publications and their citation counts were seen in the low impact factor indexed journals, it can be concluded that the scientific impact of these dissertations is low. Due to the core contributions of the field of education to the other fields, some suggestions were made to increase the scientific impact of the Turkish dissertations in line with the concrete findings of this study.