The present study was conducted to find out the development trends of the scientific studies in the field of renewable energies in Turkey. All the publications in the ISI Web database were screened using 36 different keywords in title or topics based on the affiliation addresses including the word "Turkey". A total of 12,197 publications were processed article by article and as a result 1555 papers were found to focus on renewable energies between the years 1980 and 2008 with the contributions of 1605 authors. The results showed that 45.2% was experimental, 34.3% informational studies whereas 20.5% was available system analysis. Number of publications in biomass and conversion system (39.1%) and solar energy systems (20.0%) were dominating. Both number of publications and citations increased in the last decade and more than half of total contributions were published last four years. Results indicated that policy development studies (3.3%) were the weakest among the whole parameters investigated. (c) 2008 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.