Does monetary support increase the number of scientific papers? An interrupted time series analysis

One of the main indicators of scientific production is the number of papers published in scholarly journals. Turkey ranks 18th place in the world based on the number of scholarly publications. The objective of this paper is to find out if the monetary support program initiated in 1993 by the Turkish Scientific and Technological Research Council (TÜBİTAK) to incentivize researchers and increase the number, impact and quality of international publications has been effective in doing so. We analyzed some 390,000 publications with Turkish affiliations listed in the Web of Science (WoS) database between 1976 and 2015 along with about 157,000 supported ones between 1997 and 2015. We used the interrupted time series analysis technique to test if TÜBİTAK's support program helped increase the number of publications. It appears that the support program has had negligible impact on the increase of the number of papers. We discuss the implications of findings along with the possible causes of the ineffectiveness of the support program.