Elsevier and Türkiye's Council of Higher Education (Yükseköğretim Kurulu, YÖK) announced that YÖK will adopt Scopus as its official database for monitoring and evaluating research publications, effective from 2026. Scopus replaces the index Türkiye previously used for national academic performance assessments.
YÖK President Dr. Erol Özvar described the change as part of a broader effort to align Turkish research evaluation with internationally recognized benchmarks, and to strengthen the global visibility and competitiveness of Turkish higher education. Scopus is also the exclusive bibliometric data source behind the Times Higher Education World University Rankings, and has supplied research indicators for the QS World University Rankings for more than a decade — meaning Scopus performance now has a direct line to how Turkish universities are ranked internationally, not just domestically.
Until now, Scopus indexing has mattered for international visibility and citation tracking, but it wasn't the backbone of Türkiye's own national evaluation system. That's changed. From 2026 onward, publication in Scopus-indexed venues is directly tied to how Turkish research output is measured at the institutional and national level — with consequences that reach individual researchers through academic promotion, evaluation, and funding decisions.
Practically, this means three things for researchers and PhD scholars in Türkiye:
Get support with journal selection, manuscript editing, and Scopus verification before you submit.
Search the exact journal or source title, along with its ISSN, in the official Scopus Sources database.
Confirm the coverage dates — some journals were indexed only for a specific period and are no longer actively covered.
Re-check before every submission. Indexing status can change, so a journal that was covered last year may not be covered today.
Many Turkish PhD programs require or reward journal publications during candidacy. With Scopus now the national benchmark, confirming that a target journal is currently Scopus-indexed before submission is more important than ever for a publication to count toward evaluation.
Academic promotion criteria in Türkiye are likely to increasingly reference Scopus-based metrics. Reviewing your publication record against current Scopus coverage — and prioritizing future submissions accordingly — can help avoid publications that don't count toward evaluation.
Institutional rankings and funding decisions may increasingly reflect aggregate Scopus performance. Departments may benefit from reviewing journal selection practices across their research groups to align with the new evaluation framework.