As of 2016, Bilkent University holds the position of Turkey’s top-ranking institution as measured by the prestigious Nature Index. A database of author affiliation information collated from research articles published in an independently selected group of high-quality science journals, the index provides a way to rate institutions (as well as countries) according to the number and quality of research publications produced by their scientists.
The 68 journals covered by the Nature Index represent less than 1 percent of the natural science journals covered by the Thomson Reuters Web of Science, but account for close to 30 percent of total citations to journals in this field.
In the rankings, Bilkent led in the “fractional count” (FC) and “weighted fractional count” (WFC) measures, which take into account the proportion of authors from a given institution or country who contributed to an article.
Institution AC FC WFC
- Bilkent University 29 11.67 11.47
- Izmir Institute of Technology 22 4 4
- Eastern Mediterranean University 4 4 4
- Middle East Technical University 55 4.73 3.87
- Başkent University 5 3.45 3.45
- Boğaziçi University 110 3.68 3.16
- Sabancı University 15 6.77 2.75
- Ankara University 74 2.67 2.59
- İstanbul University 22 4.21 2.01
- Hacettepe University 33 1.60 1.60
Article count (AC): a count of one is assigned to an institution or country if one or more authors of the research article are from that institution, regardless of how many co-authors there are from outside that institution.
Fractional count (FC): that takes into account the percentage of authors from that institution and the number of affiliated institutions per article. For calculation of the FC, all authors are considered to have contributed equally to the article. The maximum combined FC for any article is 1.0.
Weighted fractional count (WFC): a modified version of FC in which fractional counts for articles from specialist astronomy and astrophysics journals have been down-weighted. The WFC allows ordering of institutions so as not to give undue emphasis to these fields.