thestats: An R package for exploring Turkish higher education statistics

thestats, a user-friendly R data package that is intended to make Turkish higher education statistics more accessible. The package provides researchers access to data scraped from the portal called YOKATLAS and by using it, researchers no longer have to spend additional time digging into the Turkish higher education statistics. It does not only help researchers to query the data but also provides ready-to-use aggregation possibilities. With this, the researchers can easily calculate some statistics on the level of cities and regions.

Installation

To install the package from the CRAN by using following code:

install.packages("thestats")
library(thestats)

To install the package from the github repo, devtools is required and the package can be installed by using following code:

devtools::install_github("analyticsresearchlab/thestats")

Usage

thestats provides three easy-to-use functions: list_uni(), list_dept(), and list_score(). In a nutshell, list_uni() function helps to query universities in cities or regions specified by the user. Moreover, the function allows calculating aggregations such as the number of universities per year in cities or regions specified by the user. The function has four arguments: region_names, city_names, aggregation and lang.

• region_names argument is to pass names of the regions shown in Table 2.
• city_names is for specifying city names, aggregation is to provide the universities in specific regions or cities.
• lang argument is to select English or Turkish as a language of returned results by the function. Let's assume that the user would like to query universities in Izmir, which is a city in the west part of Turkey:

list_uni(region_names = "all", city_names = "Izmir")

Following example can be used to get the number of universities per type (state or private) in Izmir and Mugla.

list_uni(region_names = "all", 
         city_names = c("Izmir", "Mugla"), 
         aggregation = "count_by_city")

list_dept() function helps to query universities, departments in cities or regions. Moreover, it allows calculating aggregations such as the number of universities or the number of universities having specific departments per year in cities or regions specified. The function also has same arguments like list_uni(). It allows users to query departments or universities per cities or regions. As shown in the following example, there is a possibility to get universities that have Statistics departments in Izmir and Mugla.

list_dept(region_names = "all", 
          city_names = c("Izmir", "Mugla"), 
          department_names = "Statistics")

list_score() function is for querying detailed statistics about universities at the level of departments, cities, regions. The function has an additional argument is var_ids allows users to specify the type of statistics they would like to see as described in Table 3. As shown in the following example, users can pass statistics they want to see to var_ids argument. In this example, X190 refers the number of assistant professors and X196 refers the number of incoming exchange students. Following the usage of the function, it will return these statistics for the universities which are located in Izmir and have the Statistics department.

list_score(region_names = "all", 
           city_names = "Izmir",
           university_names = "all",
           department_names = "Statistics", 
           var_ids = c("X190", "X196"))

Citation

If you use thestats, please cite it:

@article{,
    title = {thestats: An Open-Data R Package for Exploring Turkish Higher Education Statistics},
    author = {Mustafa Cavus and Olgun Aydin},
    year = {2023},
    journal = {Yükseköğretim Dergisi},
    volume = {13},
    number = {1},
    pages = {1--7},
    doi = {10.2399/yod.23.1167895},
    url = {https://dergipark.org.tr/en/pub/yuksekogretim/issue/77238/1167895}
  }

Contact

For any questions and feedback, please dont hesitate to contact us via following e-mail adresses:

• [email protected]
• [email protected]