Family Studies in Türkiye: Past, Present and Future

The institution of the family, as the smallest unit of society, has always been an important topic throughout the history of thought. Within this history, the concept of oikonomia has been used to write systematic texts about women, family, children, and slaves. Aristotle, Xenophon, Plato, and Philodemus of Gadara were among the first thinkers to discuss these subjects, and since their writings aimed to examine human nature and question the moral purpose of life, they also helped build the philosophical foundation of oikonomia. The term oikonomia in Greek is formed by combining oikos, meaning “household,” and nemein, meaning “to manage or distribute property”. In Islamic thought, this concept is known as tadbīr al-manzil, although with some differences. It is known that in these texts, topics such as the economic maintenance of the family, spouse selection, division of duties, and the education of children are discussed. The influence of this approach can be clearly seen in the works of thinkers like al-Fārābī, Ibn Sīnā, Ibn Miskawayh, al-Tūsī, and. On the other hand, because this topic crosses centuries and is open to change, it has also been examined in more detail through disciplines such as sociology, psychology, education, and theology. The theme of the family is not something that only occupied past thinkers. It continues to change and evolve today in parallel with social and global events, and therefore a significant number of academic studies have been and are still being produced on it. This increase in publications makes it more difficult to analyze the themes, trends, and concepts in the literature and creates a need to evaluate studies using more specific tools and methods. Such an approach allows us to understand how debates on the family have evolved from the past to the present and helps identify impactful publications, institutions, and authors. When the literature is examined, several studies come to the forefront, such as the work by Dölek et al. (2024) titled A Bibliometric Analysis of the Foster Family System in the Context of Social Work, which focuses on the topic of foster care; the joint article by Inaltekin and Karacop (2020) titled Bibliometric Analysis of Academic Studies on Family Involvement in Education (2000–2020), which deals with the issue of family participation in education; and the study by Gürsoy (2022) called An Overview of Research Articles on Domestic Violence Published in the Field of Sociology: A Bibliometric Analysis, which focuses on domestic violence. However, most of these studies are limited to literature indexed in the Web of Science (WoS). Therefore, the lack of a comprehensive bibliometric study focusing on Türkiye-based research is seen as a gap in the academic field. In order to conduct a qualified and in-depth analysis of family-related research in Türkiye, specific bibliographic data are necessary—such as titles, abstracts, types of publications, authors’ institutional affiliations, citation counts, references, and publication years. Among available sources, Ulakbim’s Tr Dizin offers the most reliable and detailed access to this kind of data at the national level. This study focuses on family-related academic works retrieved from the Tr Dizin database and applies bibliometric data analysis. Using the VOSviewer program, the dataset has been analyzed through techniques such as word cloud analysis, keyword co-occurrence networks, related terms, and thematic clustering. The originality of this study rests on two main points: (1) it examines academic publications (specifically articles) produced within the context of Türkiye,