  One of the main indicators of scientific development of a given country is
the number of papers published in high impact scholarly journals. Many
countries introduced performance-based research funding systems (PRFSs) to
create a more competitive environment where prolific researchers get rewarded
with subsidies to increase both the quantity and quality of papers. Yet,
subsidies do not always function as a leverage to improve the citation impact
of scholarly papers. This paper investigates the effect of the publication
support system of Turkey (TR) on the citation impact of papers authored by
Turkish researchers. Based on a stratified probabilistic sample of 4,521
TR-addressed papers, it compares the number of citations to determine if
supported papers were cited more often than those of not supported ones, and if
they were published in journals with relatively higher citation impact in terms
of journal impact factors, article influence scores and quartiles. Both
supported and not supported papers received comparable number of citations per
paper, and were published in journals with similar citation impact values.
Findings suggest that subsidies do not seem to be an effective incentive to
improve the quality of scholarly papers. Such support programs should therefore
be reconsidered.
