Analysis of post-graduate theses in Industrial Engineering area of Turkish Universities

Abstract

Today, engineers make efforts for post-graduate programs far more than before. The main reasons can be increasing awareness of firms about education, decreasing job opportunities for undergraduate degrees, the increasing demand for being an academician or scholarship opportunities by government. Some firms want their postgraduate student engineers to solve the firm's problems in their master or doctoral thesis as case studies. In this regard industrial engineering is a field that adjusts almost with every sector because of its multidisciplinary nature. Thus, there are many post-graduate theses written in this area. The aim of this paper is to analyze 2,122 postgraduate theses (master & doctoral) which are carried out in the department of industrial engineering in Turkish universities. The data is obtained from the website of Council of Higher Education of Turkey. The time period is determined as 2010-2017 and only the 1780 "permission" theses are analyzed in order to reach keywords for solution approaches and keywords analysis. Nine different indicators are used to analyze the thesis such as; university status, page numbers, language, keywords etc. As a result, this study shows how the theses are clustered according to different indicators and which topics are studied more frequently in recent years. The inference of the paper is important because the results give an insight about the road map of industrial engineering thesis completed in 56 different Turkish universities.