An analysis of orthopaedic theses in Turkey: Evidence levels and publication rates

Abstract

Background: The aim of this study was to present characteristics and publication patterns of studies arisefrom orthopedic theses obtained from National Thesis Center; database in terms of publication years,study types, topics, level of evidence between 1974 and 2014.Methods: Firstly, National Thesis Center database was searched for orthopedics and Traumatology theses.The theses, which their summary or full text were available were included in the study. The topics, studytypes and quality of study designs were reviewed. Then theses were searched in the PubMed database.Journals of published theses were classiŞed according to category, scope and impact factors of the year2014. Results: 1508 theses were included into the study. Clinical studies comprised 71,7% of the theses, while25,6% of the theses were non-clinical experimental and 2,7% of the theses were observational studies.Clinical studies were Level I in 8,6% (n¼ 93) and Level II in 5,8% of the theses (n ¼ 63). A total of 224theses (14,9%) were published in the journals indexed in PubMed database from 1974 to 2012. Fifty-two(23,2%) were published in SCI; 136 theses (60,7%) were published in SCI-E journals and 36 theses (16%)were published in other Journals indexed in PubMed.Conclusion: The quantity and quality of published theses need to be improved and effective measuresshould be taken to promote quality of theses. Theses from universities and Training hospitals which didnot allow open access, and; incomplete records of the National Thesis Center database were majorlimitations of this study.© 2016 Turkish Association of Orthopaedics and Traumatology. Publishing services by Elsevier B.V. This isan open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/).