The Citation Analysis of Dissertations in the Field of Management Information Systems in Turkey

Abstract

The aim of this study is to perform a citation analysis of dissertations completed at the Department of Management Information Systems (MIS) in Turkey between 2006 and 2018. For this purpose, a total of 177 dissertations including 173 master’s and 4 doctoral dissertations were analyzed through citation analysis to investigate general characteristics and bibliometric features. The key findings show that the average number of dissertations completed per year was 14 and there is not a common pattern for the distribution of completed dissertations by the years. Most of the dissertations were completed at Boğaziçi University (45%) and Gazi University (26%). An average dissertation was 121 pages long. The average number of citations in dissertations was 76, and journals received more than half of the citations (52%) while books did 27%, electronic publications 14%, theses 5% and other types of documents/sources 2%. More than half of the journals (61%), the most frequently used source type in dissertations, were in English. “Information Management”, “Management Information Systems (MIS) Quarterly” and “Journal of Marketing” were among the most frequently cited journals. “Fred. D. Davis”, “Viswanath Venkatesh” and “Icek Ajzen” were the most frequently cited authors. The mean half-life of the sources cited in the dissertations was 7,3 years. This study is the first one which has analyzed the dissertations completed at MIS Departments in Turkey through the citation analysis method. In this respect, the findings can be used to examine the intellectual features of MIS discipline/field in Turkey and to create core library collections in the field. Moreover, this study is expected to be a pioneering one for similar citation analysis and bibliometric studies related to other types of sources in addition to dissertations and for other researchers in the field of MIS in the future.