Map of Scientific Publication in the Field of Educational Sciences and Teacher Education in Turkey: A Bibliometric Study.
Many countries make policies to achieve and support sustainable economic growth. The existence of countries on international platforms depends whether they can transform the scientific knowledge into technological developments. In addition, as the developed countries and economies become the source knowledge export, less developed countries depend more on them. It is necessary for both less developed and developing countries to systematically analyses their science policies, and guided by these policies they should make future plans, set goal and attain their goals. Bibliometric indicators first took place in Science Indicator Report of National Science Foundation in 1973 and since then they are being used in countries' science policies reports. These reports form the starting point of analyzing structure of science policies quantitatively (Karasozen, 2009) Quantitative analysis of science policies by bibliometric methods makes it possible to compare developments in areas of expertise in accordance with the world standards or to compare national institutions with each other (Zan, 2013).Turkey, as a slowly progressing country in terms of science and technology, needs bibliometric research in order to direct her main goals such as following changes in the knowledge, setting aims in accordance with the economy of developed countries and improving the quality of lab our force. The use of bibliometric in reviewing scientific articles in Turkey is at its early stage. Bibliometric is a method that uses mathematical and statistical methods to assess and analyses scientific publications and plays an important role in guiding science and technology policies (Zan, 2013).BibliometricThe qualitative and quantitative analysis of scientific publications, particularly articles, is important for revealing the change in scientific fields. Bibliometric can be defined as the 'mathematical and statistical methods employed in the analysis of scientific communication tools such as journals and books' It aims to reveal the change, development and characteristic features of a field (Diodato, 1994) The first studies in the bibliometric started before 1920s and but the term was first employed by Pritchard (1969) who defined it as application of statistical and mathematical methods to publications. Thus the term is replaced with statistical bibliography (Forsman, 2008).The statistical analysis of different aspects of scientific publications (for instance; such as author, theme, and citations) forms the basis of bibliometric studies. Bibliometric analysis can be in the form of citation analysis in order to describe and define the number of publications in a given year or to find out how a publication affected the subsequent studies (McBurney Novak, 2002).Reports prepared by institutes or scientific institutions are frequently seen in the literatures and these reports are based on bibliometric research with the aim of determining the scientific development of countries. The first report using the bibliometric is the US National Scientific Council report (Aksnes, 2006) Such reports show the status of science in a country, its existing scientific systems, research approaches, and the scientific performances of researchers (Van der Meulen, 1997) These findings play an important role in determining the scientific development of the country/field and in academic promotions. For instance, today's universities place importance not only on publications in academic promotion but also pay particular attention to the bibliometric data such as citations. Bibliometric studies basically include statistical analysis of publications and make it possible to present the general structure of a field (Egghe Rousseau, 1990; Wallace, 1989).As the importance scientific studies, which form the basis of economic development and competition in the global world, increases, and the area of use of bibliometric studies are also expanding rapidly.