A bibliometric analysis of a national Journal: The case of the Turkish Journal of Psychology

What contributions do researchers in the social sciences and humanities in Turkey make to science internationally? In an attempt to answer this question, this study conducts a bibliometric analysis of the Turkish Journal of Psychology (Turk Psikoloji Dergisi [TPD]) as indexed in the Social Science Citation Index Multidisciplinary Psychology since 1995, volume 10, issue 35. Descriptive data showed that TPD published a total of 215 articles, about 11 per year, in Turkish (84.65%) and English (15.35%). On an average, an article was authored by 2 (2.01) authors and the article/unique author ratio was about 1:1 (.98). Apart from Turkey, authors were affiliated with the USA, Canada, The Netherlands, Australia, Cyprus, England, and Germany. Most of the publications were products of authors affiliated with universities in Ankara, Turkey. TPD was ranked 115 out of 126 journals in the category of Multidisciplinary Psychology in the Journal Citation Reports‑Social Sciences Edition, with an impact factor of 0.214 in 2012 and a 5‑year impact factor of 0.154. Aside from the most common words such as the, in, and so on, “Turkish” (n = 30), followed by “study” and “memory,” were the most frequently used words in titles; “study,” (n = 325) “memory,” (n = 206) and “between” (n = 201) were the most frequently used words in abstracts. On an average, articles had about five keywords, including about four keywords unique to the article. These findings suggest that TPD is an extremely local, but highly impactful journal publishing articles on very diverse topics from self to culture, and from memory to depression to scale development.