A Systematic Review and Bibliometric Analysis of the Turkish Doctoral Dissertations Completed in the Fields of Social Sciences and Humanities

Abstract

Dissertations conducted in the fields of social sciences and humanities should provide researchers and decision makers with solutions to the problems in academia and contribute to enhancing society's social and economic welfare. The number of scientific publications extracted from dissertations and citations on them is one way to determine how much dissertations contribute to academia, society, and the quality of doctoral education. Systematic review and bibliometric analysis were implemented to understand the contributions of the dissertations to their fields. Through the systematic review, 142 dissertations, completed at 12 Turkish public universities between 2014 and 2017, in the National Thesis Center database of the Turkish Council of Higher Education were derived. The scientific publications extracted from these dissertations and citations to these publications were searched in the databases CoHE Academic, Google Scholar, ResearchGate, ScienceDirect, SCOPUS and Web of Science. Findings of bibliometric analysis indicate that 105 scientific publications were extracted from 142 dissertations, and their citation count was 241. However, these publications were predominantly published and cited in the national low impact factor indexed journals. To understand the reason for this situation, the methods of each dissertation concerning research design, data collection, and data analysis were examined thoroughly. The findings reveal that qualitative research design and secondary data, mostly used in these dissertations, might be the reasons for this issue. Some suggestions were made to reduce the problems identified concerning the quality of the main dissertation outputs.