Evaluating research performance of Turkish universities

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2014
Tekneci, Pelin Deniz
This dissertation employs different methodologies to evaluate research performance of 94 Turkish universities over the period between 2008 and 2010, compares their results, and identifies factors that enhance their performance. It consists of three papers revolving around the research performance of Turkish universities. First, we apply different Data Envelopment Analysis models and identify the best-fitting model. Second, we investigate the impact of selected factors on different research outputs using panel data analyses. Third, we use Stochastic Frontier Analysis to measure the research efficiency of Turkish universities in terms of their publication and citation performance and investigate factors affecting their efficiency. Our study will contribute to the literature in three aspects. First, we use both DEA and SFA to measure solely the research performance of both public and private Turkish universities. Secondly, we use normalized research outputs to take field-based performance differences into account. Third, while analyzing the impact of factors on the research performance, we include different research outputs instead of focusing on a single research output. Our results show that measuring research performance of universities is a complicated issue such that DEA and SFA provide different rankings. On the other hand, both models indicate that private universities (compared to public universities), and associate professors (compared to professors and assistant professors) have better performance; PhD students, external research funds and academic support personnel per faculty member significantly enhance the research performance. Moreover, it is seen that research efficiency most probably depends on the inherent abilities, culture and management practices of universities.

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Citation Formats
P. D. Tekneci, “Evaluating research performance of Turkish universities,” Ph.D. - Doctoral Program, Middle East Technical University, 2014.