Classification of Turkish Universities by quantity and titles of Academic Staff

Abstract

In this study, universities are clustered based on the quantity and title of the academics employed by Turkish Universities. The data comes from both state and private universities and vocational schools. For clustering, partitional and hierarchical clustering methods were used. The dataset was obtained from the YOK academic search website using "web scraping" techniques implemented by the authors. Agglomerative clustering technique was found to yield better results regarding cluster sizes and intracluster distances. The Silhouette coefficient is used for clustering quality measurement. As a result of the study, Turkish universities were mainly composed of four clusters. These are instructor dominant universities, just instructor based vocational schools, professor and associate professor dominated universities and research assistant dominated universities. The results of this study may be used for academic staff employment planning in Turkish Universities.