There has been a significant increase in the number of scientific publications of Turkish scientists in international journals. Turkey, which has risen 8 places in the publication rankings in 10 years, has focused on the quality of publications in the new period. TÜBİTAK President Prof. Dr. Yücel Altunbaşak announced that scientists will receive incentives of up to 5 thousand TL to increase the number of quality publications.
The number of international scientific publications, which is one of the main indicators of development in science and technology, is increasing every year. Turkey, which ranked 26th in the ranking of the number of international publications in 2000, succeeded in rising to 18th place in 2011. The incentives provided to authors by the TÜBİTAK International Scientific Publications Incentive Program (UBYT) played an important role in this success of Turkish scientists.
Turkey's success in increasing the number of international publications is not sufficiently reflected in quality rankings. In terms of the number of international citations, which is an indicator of publication quality, Turkey currently ranks 27th. While Turkey has risen 8 places in the ranking of the number of publications in 10 years, it has only moved up 4 places in the ranking of the number of citations. The gap between the two categories, which increased in parallel to each other in the past, has widened.
TÜBİTAK has taken an important step to ensure that the success in increasing the number of publications is also reflected in quality. Analyzing the data of the past 20 years of the UBYT program one by one, TÜBİTAK redesigned the program and significantly increased the payments made to authors in order to increase the quality of publications.
Journals will be the basis for quality assessment
According to the International Scientific Publications Incentive Program, which has been transformed into a structure that encourages quality publications, journals scanned by international major citation indexes will be evaluated using various parameters. Incentives ranging from 500 to 5,000 TL will be given to the publications in the journals according to the quality scoring. The program will be implemented as of May 1, 2013.
Making a statement on the subject, Prof. Altunbaşak, President of TUBITAK, said that they have increased the amount of incentives they have given to scientists up to 4 times since 1993 with the changes made. Prof. Altunbaşak said, "In the past, publications were evaluated in two separate categories as Science and Social Sciences. Under the categories, there were A, B and C groups and the amount of incentives was determined according to these groups. In other words, those who scored 80 points and those who scored 100 points were in the same group and were deemed worthy of the same incentive amount. In the new system, the two main categories and groups have been abolished. Thus, the publication will be scored according to the journal in which it is published and will receive incentives according to its score success."
Stating that all academics who publish internationally indexed publications will receive support in the renewed program, Altunbaşak said: "In the previous system, we used to provide incentives up to a maximum of 1,300 TL in Science Sciences and 2,600 TL in Social Sciences. In the renewed program, we have combined both fields and will provide incentives between 500 and 5,000 TL per publication. Scientists will be able to receive incentives for a maximum of 10 publications per year. In this direction, we have significantly increased the budget of the program compared to previous years. Last year, we gave 7 million 574 thousand TL incentives to 18 thousand 632 people."
