THE INTERNATIONAL PUBLICATION PERFORMANCE OF GEOGRAPHERS IN TURKEY (1945-2015): WHAT HAS CHANGED IN THE LAST 10 YEARS (2005-2015)?

This paper analyzes the international publication performance of Turkish geographers in the last 70 years (1945-2015), especially by focusing on over the past decade (2005-2015) experience from a critical perspective. Using the Web of Science platform, the paper analyzes the research outputs and impacts of Turkish geographers in 46 physical and 76 human geography journals as well as other journals indexed in SCI-SSCI. The findings show that Turkish geographers published 318 articles in the indexed journals during 70 years period, but 274 (86%) of them were in the last 10 years. The number of articles during the last decade has shown a great leap (9 times), but their quality has decreased by 3 times compared to the past. Only 20% of Turkish geographers have published in indexed journals and, among them, only few actors have published most of the papers. While physical geographers have achieved a significant increase in the number of articles, the success of human geography has been largely thanks to geography education. 77% of the articles have not appeared in geographical journals, instead published in non-disciplinary, easy-fast low impact factor journals. Most of the published articles originated from the young departments in Anatolia, not from the old departments in metropolis. The fact that only 8-16% of all articles from Turkey published by Turkish geographers mean that Turkish physical geography is still more represented by geologists and Turkish human geography by city-regional planners than geographers at least in the international arena. As a result, although the level of internationalization of the Turkish geography is still low, a very positive process has started in the last 10 years. However, this positive process is not a “complete internationalization”, but in some respects, it is a “distorted internationalization”