About the Journal

MerQur Journal of Data Science and Methods is a peer-reviewed, open-access (CC-BY 4.0) international academic journal publishing scientific studies that apply statistics, mathematics, data analysis and modelling — across all disciplines, with no field boundary.

Aim

MerQur aims to provide a unified publication platform for researchers producing scientific knowledge through quantitative methods, statistical modelling, data analysis and decision support systems — irrespective of their home discipline. The journal's central focus is the rigor of the applied method, the methodological consistency of inferences and the originality of the contribution to the field.

Scope

MerQur accepts original research from the following 8 core areas in which statistics, mathematics, data analysis or modelling are explicitly applied:

  1. Natural Sciences — physics, chemistry, biology, geology, earth sciences
  2. Life and Health Sciences — medicine, biomedical, public health, pharmacy, veterinary, epidemiology
  3. Engineering and Informatics — civil, mechanical, electrical, industrial, computer, artificial intelligence, data engineering
  4. Agriculture, Forestry and Environmental Sciences — agriculture, forestry, fisheries, ecology, biodiversity, climate
  5. Geography, Remote Sensing and Spatial Sciences — GIS, remote sensing, spatial statistics, geoinformatics, urban and regional analysis
  6. Social Sciences and Econometrics — economics, business, finance, sociology, political science, psychometrics
  7. Educational Sciences and Measurement-Evaluation — education, instruction, psychometrics, survey methods, behavioural sciences
  8. Decision Support Systems and Operational Research — optimization, simulation, multi-criteria decision-making, risk analysis

Acceptance Criterion

All submissions are evaluated on the precondition that the applied method is explicitly applied, reported and validated. Purely theoretical discussions or review-type studies that do not apply quantitative methods are out of scope.

Publishing Model

MerQur is a fully open-access journal. No submission or publication fee is charged from authors. All published articles are released under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC-BY 4.0) license.

The Name's Story

The name MerQur brings together two Turkish spirits: curiosity (merak) and reading (okumak). Curiosity is the desire for knowledge — the scientist's first move. Reading is the act of drawing meaning from data; rooted in the Arabic q-r-ʾ stem, it speaks the same action as the Turkish verb oku- ("to read"). The software unites two core skills of modern academia — the ability to question data and the ability to read data — within a single tool.

The letter Q, absent from the Turkish alphabet, is a bridge that ties the qur sound both to the Arabic Q-R- root of "to read" and to the international scientific vocabulary. This root has carried for centuries the act of decoding the written and drawing meaning from a text; the modern scientist faces the same act — to read the data. MerQur embodies that call as a tool. The motto of the name can therefore be summed up in a single sentence: Approach data with curiosity; read it with patience, write it with meaning.