Research and development expenditure in Turkey in 1997 was 915 million $, and the ratio of expenses to the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) was 0.49 percent. The higher education sector leads in research and development expenditure, realized at 57.2 percent, followed by the commercial sector at 32.3 percent and the public sector at 10.5 percent. If it is taken into consideration that research and development expenditure of the industrialized countries is around 2 to 2.5 percent of their GDPs, then it cannot be said that a sufficient financial source has been allocated for this objective.
The total number of full-time equivalent researchers working in the higher education, public and commercial sectors in Turkey was 23,432 as of 1997. Of these researchers 57.3 percent work in higher education, 24 percent in the commercial sector and 18.7 percent in the public sector.
It is observed that important advances have been made in Turkey in recent years as to the number of international publications, this is an indicator of the productivity of science and technology. The number of publications originating from Turkey in the periodicals scanned in the Science Citation Index was 361 in 1981 and this figure increased to 5,109 in 1998. Turkey's rank on the world list that was 42 in 1981, ascended to 25th place in 1998.