YÖK Ulusal Tez Merkezi — Turkish National Thesis Search
YÖK Ulusal Tez Merkezi (the Higher Education Council's National Thesis
Center) is the single mandatory repository for every Turkish graduate thesis —
yüksek lisans (master's), doktora (doctorate), tıpta/diş/eczacılıkta
uzmanlık (medical/dental/pharmacy specialty), and sanatta yeterlik (art
proficiency). It is the authoritative source for two faculty workflows this
skill serves:
- Literature discovery — finding existing Turkish dissertations for a
review, by topic, danışman (advisor), university, or year.
- Pre-proposal özgünlük (originality) checks — before a supervisor
approves a student's thesis topic, scanning whether the same work already
exists or is embargoed-but-registered.
This skill is discovery + metadata harvesting + citation, not bulk
full-text download (full text is online-view-only — see access model below).
When to Use This Skill
YÖK Ulusal Tez Merkezi'nde "sürdürülebilir mimari" konulu tezleri ara
Bir öğrencim "sanal prodüksiyon" üzerine doktora yapmak istiyor; daha önce yapılmış mı?
Find every doctoral dissertation supervised by Prof. X at IEU
Cite this YÖK thesis in APA 7 (Turkish)
Is this thesis topic novel, or has it already been done in Turkey?
→ Construct a Detaylı Tarama (detailed search) query, run it through the
yoktez-mcp connector (or drive the form), dedupe results into a
{Tez No, year, university, danışman, title, izin} table, and — when asked —
emit a Türkçe APA-7 citation.
Does NOT Trigger — route these elsewhere
| Request | Correct skill |
|---|
| Search Turkish journal articles on DergiPark | alterlab-dergipark |
| Check a journal's TR Dizin index status / search the national citation index | alterlab-trdizin |
| Look up an academic's profile / supervised-thesis list / affiliation on YÖK Akademik | alterlab-yok-akademik |
| University program admission statistics (kontenjan, taban puan) on YÖK Atlas | alterlab-yokatlas |
| Compute doçentlik (associate-professorship) eligibility points | alterlab-docentlik-eligibility |
| Compute akademik teşvik (academic-incentive) score | alterlab-akademik-tesvik |
| Hands-on thesis writing / supervision / defense coaching (chapters, viva) | alterlab-thesis-supervisor |
| Build a PRISMA systematic review over biomedical/scientific databases | alterlab-literature-review |
| Manage a Zotero/BibTeX reference library | alterlab-citation-mgmt |
| Türkçe APA-7 / TR Dizin house style rules in general (not a thesis cite) | alterlab-tr-academic-style |
This skill answers "does this Turkish thesis exist / has this been done, and how
do I cite it?" — it does not write the thesis, judge journals, or score careers.
The data path: yoktez-mcp
There is no official public API for Ulusal Tez Merkezi. The maintained,
verified community path is the saidsurucu/yoktez-mcp MCP server (MIT
licensed). Prefer it over scraping.
Install (uv-first, matches the local toolchain):
uvx --from git+https://github.com/saidsurucu/yoktez-mcp yoktez-mcp
Hosted connector: https://yoktezmcp.fastmcp.app/mcp
It exposes exactly two tools:
| Tool | Purpose | Key parameters |
|---|
search_yok_tez_detailed | Detailed search → paginated thesis summaries + total count | thesis_title, author_name, advisor_name, university_name, institute_name, department_name, discipline_name, thesis_number, subject_headings, index_terms, abstract_text, thesis_type, permission_status, thesis_status, language, institute_group, year_start, year_end, page, results_per_page |
get_yok_tez_document_markdown | Fetch a permitted thesis PDF as Markdown | detail_page_url, page_number |
These map one-to-one onto the public Detaylı Tarama form fields: Tez Adı
(title), Yazar (author), Danışman (advisor), Konu (subject), Anahtar
Kelime (keyword), Özet (abstract), Tez No (thesis number).
If the connector is unavailable, the search form at
https://tez.yok.gov.tr/UlusalTezMerkezi/ can be driven directly (a real
browser is required — see references/endpoints.md for the gated-viewer
caveat). Never invent a JSON/REST endpoint — none is published.
A small offline helper, scripts/yok_tez_query.py, builds a normalized query
spec and the matching search_yok_tez_detailed argument dict from a plain
description (handy for the stemming/boolean rules below) without any network
call. See Search craft.
Search craft (apply these automatically)
The full rule set with worked examples is in
references/search_syntax.md. The essentials:
- Search Turkish roots, not inflected forms — the engine auto-stems Turkish,
so query
sürdürülebilir rather than sürdürülebilirliğin. Diacritics
(ç ğ ı İ ö ş ü) need not be normalized by the user.
- Boolean operators are
ve / veya / içermesin (and / or / must-not-contain),
not AND/OR/NOT. Phrase-match by keeping words adjacent.
- Run BOTH a Turkish and an English query. English terms only hit the
English title/abstract/keyword fields, so an all-Turkish query silently
misses theses written/indexed in English, and vice-versa.
- Search across
Konu, Tez Adı, and Özet for topic coverage — a title
may not name the concept the abstract develops.
Originality / supervision check (the repeatable recipe)
When a supervisor asks "has this thesis topic already been done?", do not
run a naive open-access-only search — that misses the most important
near-duplicates. Instead:
- Build paired TR+EN queries (above) across
Konu, Tez Adı, and abstract_text.
- Constrain
thesis_type (e.g. Doktora) and a recent year_start–year_end
window if the user gave one.
- Set
permission_status to "Tümü" (All) so İzinsiz (restricted,
abstract-only) theses still surface — embargoed work is exactly what a naive
search hides, and it is still prior art for a proposal.
- Return a deduplicated table:
{Tez No, year, university, danışman, title, izin}, sorted newest-first, for the supervisor to scan.
- State explicitly that this is registry coverage, not a plagiarism / text-
similarity score (that is iThenticate/Turnitin territory, out of scope here).
Access model (set correct expectations)
- Full text is online-view-only for İzinli (permitted) theses — viewable in
the browser, no photocopy / bulk download. The
get_yok_tez_document_markdown
tool works only on permitted theses.
- Abstracts (özet) are always available, even when full text is embargoed.
- İzinsiz (restricted) theses show metadata + abstract only; the full text
is reachable in print via TÜBESS / inter-library loan through a university
library.
- Pre-2006 closed theses can be opened by the author submitting a Tez
Yayımlama İzin Belgesi (thesis-publication permission document).
- Legal basis: Law 7100 Art. 10 and Higher Education Law 2547 Additional Art.
40 — theses are electronically accessible by default unless an authorized
gizlilik (confidentiality) decision applies. YÖK's FAQ states no fixed
maximum embargo length; do not assert a "12-month cap."
Full detail in references/access_legal.md.
Caps and bulk harvest
- Hard cap: 2000 results per search. For broad topics, split the query by
year range, university, or institute to stay under it, then merge
and dedupe locally.
- For large/repeated harvests, the cleaned community mirror tezara.org
("Tez Arama ve Metaveri Analizi Platformu") offers structured export and
sidesteps the per-search cap; see
references/endpoints.md for what is and isn't
verified about it.
- Bulk Turkish↔English query expansion, advisor-name normalization, and CSV
dedup are good fits to offload to a local LLM (qwen3-coder / gemma4) rather
than burning API calls — this work is bulky, repetitive, and privacy-neutral.
Citing a YÖK thesis (Türkçe APA-7)
Map the YÖK Tez No directly to APA's Yayın No. (publication number).
The scripts/yok_tez_query.py --cite mode formats both states; rules and more
examples in references/citation_apa7.md.
- Published / permitted (has a Yayın No.):
Soyad, A. (Yıl). Tez başlığı (Yayın No. NNNNNN) [Tez türü, Üniversite
Adı]. YÖK Ulusal Tez Merkezi.
- Unpublished / restricted:
Soyad, A. (Yıl). Tez başlığı [Yayımlanmamış tez türü tezi]. Üniversite Adı.
Optionally also emit BibTeX @phdthesis / @mastersthesis with
note = {YÖK Ulusal Tez Merkezi, Tez No. NNNNNN}.
Self-check before reporting
- Did you run both a Turkish and an English query? An all-Turkish search is
not complete.
- For an originality check, did you set
permission_status = Tümü so İzinsiz
theses surfaced? Restricted ≠ nonexistent.
- Did any broad search hit the 2000 cap? If
total ≈ 2000, split and re-run —
you are almost certainly truncated.
- Are citations using Tez No → Yayın No. with the correct
published vs unpublished template?
- Did you state that registry coverage ≠ a text-similarity / plagiarism score?
References
references/endpoints.md — verified vs. unverified
endpoints, the yoktez-mcp tool surface, the gated TezGoster viewer, tezara.org.references/search_syntax.md — auto-stemming,
ve/veya/içermesin, TR+EN pairing, field-targeting, worked queries.references/access_legal.md — İzinli/İzinsiz,
TÜBESS, pre-2006 opening, Law 7100 / 2547 legal basis, embargo facts.references/citation_apa7.md — Türkçe APA-7
thesis templates and the Tez No → Yayın No. mapping.
Part of the AlterLab Academic Skills suite.
