A comparative study of postgraduate theses in pedagogy and preschool education in Austria and Turkey

In this study, postgraduate theses in the fields of pedagogy and preschool education in Austria and Turkey are compared in terms of factors such as similarity index, research designs and quality of academic writing. To achieve this goal, a commonly-used web-based plagiarism detection service was used to determine the similarity indexes of 258 theses prepared in the two countries (124 from Austria, 134 from Turkey) by checking them against existing sources such as articles, theses, and books; and a relational screening model was used to determine the degree of correlation among variables. In addition, the research topics, research designs, and data collection tools employed in each thesis were identified and content analysis was performed on selected theses with an eye to gaining a sense of the methodological approaches used in pedagogy in Austrian and Turkish universities and making comparisons between the two countries. Our results suggest that the mean similarity index between the postgraduate theses in Austria is 8.78 (Std. Dev. 4.91), while the mean similarity index between the postgraduate theses prepared in Turkey is 25.10 (Std. Dev. 9.85). Our analysis indeed indicates that 91% (n 113) of the theses prepared at Austrian universities and only 13% (n 17) of the theses prepared at Turkish universities did not exceed the acceptable similarity index of 15%. The fact that 87% of the theses written in Turkey are dramatically similar to the available resources shows that many of the studies carry potential risks in terms of originality and plagiarism.