DOI: 10.7763/IPEDR. 2014. V76. 8 Productive Academic Database Enrolment Sadi Evren SEKER 1 , Mehmet Lutfi ARSLAN 1 , and Menduh DINC 1 1 Department of Business, Istanbul Medeniyet University Abstract. University libraries are, more than ever, confronting to allocate their resources in more efficient and productive ways. On the one hand, they try to diversify their options to have rich collections; on the other hand, they challenge the risk of purchasing expensive, repetitive and outdated service, which creates a dilemma. Universities and research institutes in terms of academic database selection are between the poor selection and the inefficient selection. In this study, we try to measure productivity of academic database selection of Turkish universities via statistical parameters, like the number of downloaded papers, the number of academicians, the number of students and so on. The results show that the efficiency varies and the research underlines the importance of productivity through a statistical parameterization of the competitive approach in the selection process. While doing this, we provide a decision support system for the online database selection for academic libraries. Keywords: Strategic Competition, Higher Learning, University Ranking, Online Databases, Research Indices, Decision Support System. 1. Introduction Online academic databases are one of the major parameters to indicate the research level of the universities. Beyond the number of selections, the efficiency and productivity of selection and the effective usage of online academic databases is also another important issue. According to study by Kaser in 2011, subscription to journals and databases represent about half of the budget of academic and special libraries. [1] We aim to figure out a useful decision support system for the research institutes and universities during the enrollment. Also the decision support system is useful in bi-directional ways. In one direction the organizations can use the system during the decision phase of enrollment. On the contrary direction, the efficiency of enrollment can be figured out from the decision support system. Fig. 1: Deployment of DSS. As it is demonstrated on Fig. 1, universities have a decision phase during the enrollment of the online databases. The decision is mostly related with the university budget and the academic usage / demand to the online academic databases. If the university is enrolled in an online academic database, the university benefits from the database by searching or accessing journals / papers. Online academic databases have advantages to the search engines like well categorized and indexed paper access or stable information about the papers. Also the competition among universities has an encouraging effect over the decision. During our research, we propose a new decision support system to the universities built on the efficiency of the enrollment. We have collected university effectiveness of online database enrollment for 6 years and we propose the decision support system over the online academic database prices, the number of papers  Corresponding author. Tel.: + 9 0532 4467882 E-mail address: {sadi.seker,lutfi.arslan,menduh.dinc}@medeniyet.edu.tr. 40