Evaluation of the Disciplinary Relations in Tourism Geography Research in Turkey Using a Social Network Analysis

Theses, which are the most important outcomes of an academic discipline, reflect the traditions and scientific ecosystem of the research area they belong to and are reliable and valid sources in this respect. The analysis of the references used in the theses helps to understand the intellectual development, cultural transformation, accumulation of knowledge, paradigmatic evolution and disciplinary information flow of the relevant discipline. The aim of this study is to manifest and evaluation the distribution of citations used in theses according to postgraduate theses/ disciplines in the area of tourism geography in Turkey as well as the ratio of discipline related and non-related references and the contribution of national or international literature in the theses with a social network analysis. In this respect, the bibliography of 103 theses on tourism prepared between the years 1975-2015 by geographers in Turkey have been studied as samples. The academic disciplines/fields of a total of 11.110 bibliographies used in these theses were determined, a correspondence analysis according to the fields and universities was carried out and the relation and interaction of the areas of the bibliographies used in the theses was evaluated with a social network analysis. According to the results of the study, tourism geography is sustained more by a non-area sub-discipline in Turkey. However, contrary to the earlier era when the theses were completed, due to the fact that less reference is made to non-discipline subjects in the recent period, tourism geography tends to withdraw in terms of disciplinary interaction and is moving away from post-disciplinary science practices. Moreover, an examination of the theses reveals that because providing references in thesis preparation ismore oriented towards natural sciences than social sciences, the discipline of tourism geography is distanced from the ecosystem of social sciences and the discipline has a problem of articulation into the modern science system and the scientific community in which international knowledge is generated because it is not adequately sustained by international sources.