PROFILE ANALYSIS OF GRADUATE THESES CONDUCTED ON COMPUTER SCIENCE AND ENGINEERING IN TURKEY Volkan Tunalı, Turgay Tugay Bilgin Department of Software Engineering, Maltepe University, Istanbul, Turkey {volkantunali@maltepe.edu.tr, turgaybilgin@maltepe.edu.tr} ABSTRACT In this study, we investigated 6,307 master’s and PhD theses prepared in the field of computer science and engineering between 1983 and 2012 in Turkey. Thesis data was compiled from the YÖK national thesis database web portal. We presented the profile analysis of the theses in terms of several attributes like thesis year, university, and advisor. Furthermore, we analyzed the popularity of research areas over the years, and presented the change in the research themes in Turkey based on the keywords obtained from graduate theses. KEYWORDS Graduate theses, computer science, computer engineering, profile analysis. 1 INTRODUCTION Graduate theses have significant value in the development of a discipline. Analysis of theses conducted on a discipline can provide valuable information about coverage and depth of the field, and can present the general view of the field, revealing the trends and also the topics saturated over the years. There are several notable studies in the literature that provide analysis of theses on several disciplines. In the field of health management there is one study that explains the profiles of master’s and doctoral theses in Turkey (Göktaş and Erdem, 2006). It covers 406 theses prepared between 1985-2003, and concludes that the discipline of health management is of multidisciplinary characteristics open to interaction with other several fields. Another study covers 259 master’s theses from 9 universities in the field of eduation technologies in Turkey (Şimşek et al., 2008). The study shows that most of the research in that field since 2000 is about computer-aided education, web- based and distance education. There is another study that analyzes 1,100 theses on labor economics and industrial relations from 1984 to 2007 in Turkey (Yorgun, 2009). This study shows that the topics covered by the theses examined do not reflect the interdisciplinery position of the field adequately. A study that evaluates the characteristics of PhD theses in sports sciences gives eloborate statistical results about the subject distribution of the theses (Yaman and Atay, 2007). To the best of our knowledge there is no comprehensive and up-to-date study that examines and analyzes the theses conducted specifically on computer science and engineering in Turkey. Motivated by this, we performed a detailed profile analysis of graduate theses in the discipline of computer science and engineering. This paper is organized as follows. Section 2 explains the aim and scope of our research. Data acquisition method is described in Section 3. Results and discussion are provided in Section 4. Finally, Section 5 contains some conclusions and future work. 2 AIM AND SCOPE In this study we primarily aim at investigating the profile of the graduate theses conducted on computer science and engineering in Turkey. Moreover, we try to understand the research interests and trends over the last three decades in this field from the theses. We examined 6,307 master’s and PhD theses conducted and submitted to the national thesis database of The Council of Higher Education (Yükseköğretim Kurulu – YÖK) between 1983 and 2012 for this purpose. Distribution of thesis numbers over the years is shown in Table 1 and illustrated in Figure 1. Since we collected the thesis data in July 2012, the number of theses in 2012 is obviously very low. Since 2006, graduate theses have been being submitted to the thesis database of YÖK online by thesis authors. Theses completed before 2006 were also archived in the database. Since 2007, the thesis database have been available online to the researchers for both thesis search and full text download in PDF format. Besides the full text, such data about theses as author, advisors, university, institute, main thesis subject, index terms, and abstracts are also publicly available. Furthermore, it is possible to search the *HGL] 8QLYHUVLW\ UG ,QWHUQDWLRQDO 6\PSRVLXP RQ &RPSXWLQJ LQ 6FLHQFH  (QJLQHHULQJ ,6&6(  KWWSLVFVHJHGL]HGXWU  2FWREHU   .XúDGDVﾕ $\GﾕQ 7XUNH\