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Abstract: The number of scientific publications serves as a crucial indicator of a country's scientific standing. Subsequent to 2016, the academic productivity of Turkey exhibited a gradual decline in the rankings, despite substantial investments in higher education. In the period between 2016 and 2018, over eight thousand academics were dismissed from state universities. In total, this equates to 5.7% (n=3,542) of the 60,385 professors. The present study sought to evaluate the impact of these mass dismissals on the scientific publication performance of the affected institutions. The scientific publication performance of all 108 state universities was evaluated between the years 2012 and 2019. The universities were classified according to the proportion of academics dismissed relative to the total number of professors in 2016. The categories were as follows: <5.0% (n=47, Group 1), 5.0-10.0% (n=41, Group 2), and >10.0% (n=20, Group 3). The number of annual scientific publications that were carried out and those that were expected to be carried out were compared following the mass dismissal. The number of publications increased by approximately 13.2% per year between 2012 and 2016 (from 34,130 to 52,168) and by 3.1% from 2016 to 2019 (from 52,168 to 57,013). The anticipated total number of publications was projected to be 55,643 in 2017, 60,225 in 2018, and 64,806 in 2019. The observed-expected differences were 13.8%, 13.4%, and 12.0%, respectively. The mean number of publications exhibited a decline in 2017 across all three groups. Group 2 and Group 3 were more significantly affected than Group 1. There were notable differences between Group 1 and Group 3 (p-values for 2017, 2018, and 2019 were 0.027, 0.009, and 0.017, respectively). The academic purge at Turkish universities had a substantial impact on overall academic productivity, extending beyond the number of academics dismissed. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.51505/ijmshr.2024.8601 |
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