A Bibliometric Analysis of Foreign Academics in Turkish Research Universities

Academic mobility has begun to be discussed more frequently in higher education literature with more internationalized higher education. Since the flow of talent generally occurs from the periphery to the core, it is seen that studies mostly deal with either foreign researchers in developed countries or researchers returning to their developing home countries. However, this study aims to examine the mobility of foreign academics in a reverse direction. Specific to research universities in Turkey, foreign academics' demographic information, academic qualifications, and contributions to their universities were examined with a bibliometric analysis. The findings were also discussed within the legal framework determined by Turkish authorities regarding the employment of foreign academics. The findings show that (i) the proportion of foreign academics with and without a Ph.D. in research universities is close to each other, (ii) researchers are concentrated in the arts and humanities research, (iii) more than half of the academics have completed their doctoral studies in high-income economies, (iv) less than half of the researchers graduated from universities ranked in the top 500 list of THE World University Rankings, and (v) there is a variation among universities in their contributions to research, citation performance, and graduate counseling. In this respect, the results show that the majority of researchers at research universities are not directly employed with a research orientation, and the legal framework contains caveats that need to be explained for research universities.