Turkish-addressed social sciences citation index articles: What does the big picture tell us?

Abstract

This study investigates articles in the SSCI written in the English language and published in the ‘Education & Educational Research’ area between 1980 and 2019. In the study, bibliometric methods were used to detect the number of SSCI articles published worldwide, and also the articles with a Turkish author address entered, meaning at least one author provided Turkey as their location. In addition, analysis was conducted according to various variables (e.g., research areas, publication year, number of authors, and source titles). The bibliometric data were obtained from the Web of Science Core Collection database. With regards to the ‘Education & Educational Research’ area, the analysis indicated the dominance of English-speaking countries in terms of the number of SSCI-indexed articles and those that had been cited the most. This finding appears to be affected by the majority of journals indexed in SSCI only accepting articles written in the English language. In terms of the number of SSCI articles published in the area of ‘Education & Educational Research’, Turkey was shown to be ranked seventh worldwide. Within Turkey, the number of SSCI articles for the ‘Education & Educational Research’ area ranked second, after ‘Business & Economics’. In comparison to the overall worldwide trend, the study's findings suggest that Turkish researchers have a tendency towards publishing their articles in mainly Turkey-originated journals with low impact factors. Factors that may affect this tendency and the potential implications of these findings are discussed, together with the limitations of the study and suggestions for further research.