gms | German Medical Science

Hintergrund: For some time, Turkey has achieved a fast growth in higher education and research. The numbers of higher education institutions, numbers of total academics, and scientific publications rapidly increased for several decades. However, between 2016 and 2018, more than eight thousand academics were dismissed from state universities with governmental decrees after a coup attempt, and a significant number of them were detained.

Fragestellung: This study aimed to evaluate the effects of the mass dismissal and detention of academics on the scientific publication performance at state universities.

Methoden: We evaluated the effects of the mass dismissal and detention of academics on the scientific publication performance at state universities. We assessed the scientific publication performance of all 108 state universities who were operating in 2016.

Ergebnisse: Of the 60,385 professors, 3,452 (5.7%) were dismissed with governmental decrees between 2016 and 2018. The total number of scientific publications increased from 38,825 in 2014 to 47,073 in 2015 (21.2% rise) and to 52,168 in 2016 (10.8% rise), followed by a decrease to 47,940 in 2017 (8.1% decline). In 2018 and 2019, the total number of publications became 52,171 and 56,800, respectively. Using the total number of publications in 2014 and 2015, the expected mean numbers of scientific publications were calculated as 519.70 in 2016, 591.10 in 2017, 662.50 in 2018, and 733.90 in 2019. The difference between the expected and observed number of publications was 7.06% in 2017, which increased up to 27.09% in 2018.

Diskussion: The academic purge from the state universities in Turkey significantly affected total scholarly productivity. An international environment should be established to protect the safe functioning of scientists.

Take Home Message für die Praxis: Safety measures must be in place to protect scientists from possible political events that might interfere with their productivity.