DOI: 10.26650/istjecon2026-1835809 ISSN: 2602-3954

The Development and Transformation of Public Finance as a Scientific Discipline in Türkiye: A Bibliometric Analysis of the 70-Year Archive of the Public Finance Research Centre, Istanbul University Faculty of Economics

Hüseyin Özgül, Naci Saruç, Aslıhan Uzundurugan
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Bibliometric analysis facilitates the systematic and in-depth examination of scholarly output and the evolution of research trends in a specific field. Existing bibliometric studies in the field of public finance have generally focused on assessing the publication performance of journals, while topic and keyword analyses tend to remain descriptive rather than analytically rigorous. Moreover, these studies do not systematically establish a relationship between a country’s economic developments and the timing of publications. This study examines how public finance has evolved as a scientific discipline in Türkiye, with a particular focus on the Journal of Public Finance Studies. Given the journal’s 70-year publication history, the study offers significant longitudinal insights. For the analysis, the data were coded and organized using MAXQDA. Besides English, the journal has featured scholarly contributions in multiple other languages, notably French, German, and Italian, and in terms of international contributions, the countries accounting for the highest number of publications in the journal are the United States, Germany, and France. The analysis shows that studies from 1955–1979 primarily focused on establishing Türkiye’s tax system, while the 1980–1999 period concentrated on the European Union, privatization, and liberalization. After 2000, public debt management became dominant, alongside emerging topics like environmental taxation and gender budgeting. Overall, the findings suggest that studies conducted between 1955 and 2000 predominantly focused on the development and transformation of Türkiye’s fiscal system and fiscal policies, a conclusion supported by the Ministry of Treasury and Finance being the second most prolific institutional contributor.

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