# Alterlab Yok Akademik > Looks up a Turkish academic's official YOKSIS-backed profile, current affiliation, unvan (academic title), publications, research projects, and supervised theses on the YOK Akademik portal (akademik.yok.gov.tr/AkademikArama/), a server-rendered JSP app with no public JSON API, by scraping its verified endpoints (AkademisyenArama POST search, viewAuthor.jsp profile, AkademisyenProjeBilgileri, AkademisyenYonTezBilgileri) keyed by an opaque authorId, with Turkish-character (Iı Şş Ğğ Çç Öö Üü) normalization for name matching. Use when the request is to verify a Turkish academic's current institution, find a researcher on YOK Akademik, confirm affiliation for authorship or a recommendation letter, or list someone's supervised theses or projects. For admission statistics (kontenjan, taban puan) use alterlab-yokatlas; for the national thesis full-text archive use alterlab-yok-tez; for publication metadata enrichment use alterlab-openalex. Part of the AlterLab Academic Skills suite. - Skill: `alterlab-ieu/alterlab-yok-akademik` (Agent Skill, multi-file: 6 files) - Install (CLI): `npx skillmds@latest add alterlab-ieu/alterlab-yok-akademik` - Raw SKILL.md: https://api.skillmd.com/api/skills/alterlab-ieu/alterlab-yok-akademik/raw - Safety review: pending (external: skill-scanner PASS, skillspector PASS) - Works with: Claude Code, Claude.ai, OpenAI Codex - Category: Research & Search - License: MIT - Author: AlterLab-IEU (https://skillmd.com/u/alterlab-ieu) - Updated: 2026-09-08 - Page: https://skillmd.com/skills/alterlab-ieu/alterlab-yok-akademik --- # YOK Akademik — Official Turkish Academic Profile & Affiliation Lookup **YOK Akademik** (Yükseköğretim Kurulu Akademik — the Turkish Council of Higher Education's academic search portal) is the **authoritative source for a Turkish academic's official current affiliation**. It is YÖKSİS-backed (the national higher-education information system), so for Turkish institutions it is more reliable than ORCID or OpenAlex affiliation strings, which lag and fragment. This skill resolves a name to that official record: current **kurum** (institution), **fakülte/bölüm** (faculty/department), **unvan** (academic title — e.g. *Prof. Dr.*, *Doç. Dr.*, *Dr. Öğr. Üyesi*), plus the person's portal-listed publications, research **projeler** (projects), and **danışmanlık yapılan tezler** (supervised theses). > **No public JSON API exists.** The portal at `akademik.yok.gov.tr/AkademikArama/` > is a server-rendered Java/JSP app. The only route is polite HTML scraping of its > verified endpoints. Treat every record as authoritative-but-scraped: confirm a > candidate match with the user before asserting an affiliation. ## When to Use This Skill Use this skill when the request is to: - **Verify a Turkish academic's current institution / affiliation** (for authorship bylines, a recommendation letter, a grant team, an editorial-board check). - **Find / look up a researcher on YOK Akademik** by name. - **Read someone's official unvan** (title) and faculty/department. - **List the theses someone has supervised** (master's / doctorate), with student, year, and institution. - Pull the person's portal-listed publications or research projects as a starting set. ### Does NOT Trigger Route these adjacent asks to the correct sibling skill — do **not** answer them here: | The request is really about… | Use instead | |------------------------------|-------------| | University/program admission statistics — kontenjan, taban puan, başarı sırası, yerleşen | `alterlab-yokatlas` | | Reading or citing a **thesis full text / abstract** from the national archive (Ulusal Tez Merkezi) | `alterlab-yok-tez` | | Searching the national journal-hosting platform DergiPark | `alterlab-dergipark` | | Whether a **journal** is indexed in TR Dizin (the national citation index) | `alterlab-trdizin` | | Enriching/verifying **publication metadata** (DOIs, citation counts, co-authors) | `alterlab-openalex` | | Checking whether the cited papers actually **exist** (fabricated citations) | `alterlab-citation-verifier` | | Computing **doçentlik** (associate-professorship) eligibility points from a publication list | `alterlab-docentlik-eligibility` | | Computing the **akademik teşvik** (academic-incentive) score | `alterlab-akademik-tesvik` | YOK Akademik answers **"who is this academic, officially, and where are they now?"** It does **not** judge research quality, compute career-progression points, or fetch thesis full text. ## The verified endpoints (no API key) All under the base `https://akademik.yok.gov.tr/AkademikArama/`. There is **no** documented JSON API; these are HTML/JSP pages. See [`references/endpoints.md`](references/endpoints.md) for the full map, parameters, and verification status of each. | Step | Endpoint | Returns | |------|----------|---------| | Search by name | **POST** `AkademisyenArama` with `aramaTerim=&islem=1&…Checkbox=on` → category page → follow its **Akademisyenler** link → `view/searchResultviewListAuthor.jsp` | Candidate rows: name, unvan, university, faculty/department, and the profile link carrying the **opaque `authorId`** | | Profile / select author | `AkademisyenGorevOgrenimBilgileri?islem=direct&authorId=` → renders `view/viewAuthor.jsp` | The person's header: current kurum, fakülte, bölüm, unvan, ORCID/email badges. This GET also **registers the author** in the session (the tabs below 500 without it). | | Projects | `AkademisyenProjeBilgileri?authorId=` | Portal-listed research projects (AB / TÜBİTAK / araştırma …) | | Publications | `AkademisyenYayinBilgileri?pubType=&authorId=` | Typed tabs (Kitaplar / Makaleler / Bildiriler). `pubType` is **required & opaque** — discover the tokens from the profile page (empty `pubType` → HTTP 418) | | Supervised theses | `AkademisyenYonTezBilgileri?authorId=` | Danışmanlık tezleri: title, student, level, year, institution | `authorId` is an **opaque** value (a 16-hex-char token, e.g. `006B496E5F3E4EE2`) — never construct or guess one; only use IDs you obtained from a live search result. A cookie **session** is mandatory: the helper GETs the portal root first so the server sets the JSESSIONID the search POST needs (a session-less POST returns HTTP 500). ## Workflow ### 1. Normalize the name and search Turkish casing is a real trap: `İ→i` and `I→ı` are *not* the ASCII fold. Search the name **as the user gave it** (correctly-encoded UTF-8), and also try a diacritic-folded variant so `"Cağrı"`, `"Cagri"`, and `"Çağrı"` all reach the same person. The helper script does both. See [`references/turkish_names.md`](references/turkish_names.md) for the exact İ/ı, Ş/ş, Ğ/ğ, Ç/ç, Ö/ö, Ü/ü rules and matching strategy. ```bash uv run python skills/turkish-academia/alterlab-yok-akademik/scripts/yok_akademik.py \ search "Ayşe Yılmaz" ``` This returns the candidate list (pretty JSON by default; add `--json` for compact single-line output). **Each candidate carries its `authorId`, name, and unvan.** ### 2. Disambiguate with the user Common names return many people. Present the candidates as a table — **name · unvan · university · faculty/department** — and ask the user which one (or confirm the institution they expected). Do **not** silently pick the first row and assert an affiliation; that is exactly how a wrong byline or letter gets written. ### 3. Pull the chosen profile / projects / theses / publications The `authorId` you pass must come from a live search row. Each per-author command first **lands on the profile** (which selects the author in the session) before fetching its tab — the helper handles that for you. ```bash # Profile header (affiliation, unvan) uv run python .../scripts/yok_akademik.py profile --author-id # Research projects (AB / TÜBİTAK / araştırma …) uv run python .../scripts/yok_akademik.py projects --author-id # Supervised theses uv run python .../scripts/yok_akademik.py theses --author-id # Portal-listed publications (typed tabs: Kitaplar / Makaleler / Bildiriler) uv run python .../scripts/yok_akademik.py pubs --author-id ``` ### 4. Report — and state provenance When you report an affiliation, say it came from **YOK Akademik (YÖKSİS)** and give the date, because people move. If the scrape failed or the portal returned a 302/500 (it does so intermittently), say so and fall back to WebFetch on the search page — **never** invent an affiliation, authorId, title, or thesis from memory. ## Politeness & robustness rules The portal is a public service with no API; scrape gently. - One descriptive `User-Agent`; **throttle** (≈1–2 s between requests); retry the frequent transient 302/500 responses with backoff before giving up. - Cache results within a session — don't re-hit the same `authorId` repeatedly. - The script prefers `requests` + `BeautifulSoup`; if `BeautifulSoup` is absent it degrades to a stdlib `html.parser` extraction so it still runs in a bare `uv` env. - On total failure it emits a structured `{"status": "unavailable", ...}` record with manual-lookup instructions, never a fabricated profile. ## Self-Check Before Reporting - Did a **live search** return the `authorId` I'm using, or did I guess it? (Never guess.) - Did I **disambiguate** when more than one candidate matched the name? - Is the affiliation I'm reporting attributed to **YOK Akademik / YÖKSİS** with a date? - Did the request actually want admission stats (`alterlab-yokatlas`) or thesis full text (`alterlab-yok-tez`) instead? Re-check the "Does NOT Trigger" table. - If the portal failed, did I say so plainly rather than filling the gap from memory? ## References - [`references/endpoints.md`](references/endpoints.md) — the verified JSP endpoint map, parameters, the `authorId` note, and what is verified vs. unverified. - [`references/turkish_names.md`](references/turkish_names.md) — Turkish casing/diacritic rules (İ/ı etc.) and the name-matching strategy. - [`references/affiliation_verification.md`](references/affiliation_verification.md) — why YÖKSİS beats ORCID/OpenAlex for TR affiliation, and the disambiguation checklist. Part of the AlterLab Academic Skills suite.