Support Programs to Increase the Number of Scientific Publications Using Bibliometric Measures: The Turkish Case

Bibliometric measures for scientific journals such as journal impact factor, cited half-life, and article influence score are readily available through commercial companies such as Thomson Reuters, among others. These metrics were originally developed to help librarians in collection building and are based on the citation rates of published papers. Yet, they are increasingly being used, albeit undeservedly, as proxies for peer review to assess the quality of individual papers; and research funding, hiring, academic promotion and publication support policies are developed accordingly. This paper reviews the use of such metrics by the Turkish Scientific and Technological Research Council (TUBITAK) in its Support Program of International Scholarly Publications and concentrates on the most recent policy changes. A sample of 228 journals was selected on the basis of stratified sampling method to study the impact of changing algorithms on the level of support that journals received in 2013 and 2014. Findings are discussed and some recommendations are offered to improve the existing algorithm. Conference Topic Country level studies