The General Growth Tendency: A tool to improve publication trend reporting by removing record inflation bias and enabling quantitative trend analysis

The trend of the number of publications on a research field is often used to quantify research interest and effort, but this measure is biased by general publication record inflation. This study introduces a novel metric as an unbiased and quantitative tool for trend analysis and bibliometrics. The metric was used to reanalyze reported publication trends and perform in-depth trend analyses on patent groups and a broad range of field in the life-sciences. The analyses confirmed that inflation bias frequently results in the incorrect identification of field-specific increased growth. It was shown that the metric enables a more detailed, quantitative and robust trend analysis of peer reviewed publications and patents. Some examples of the metric's uses are quantifying inflation-corrected growth in research regarding microplastics (51% +/- 10%) between 2012 and 2018 and detecting inflation-corrected growth increase for transcriptomics and metabolomics compared to genomics and proteomics (Tukey post hoc p<0.0001). The developed trend-analysis tool removes inflation bias from bibliometric trend analyses. The metric improves evidence-driven decision-making regarding research effort investment and funding allocation.

Automated summary

This study introduces a novel metric to eliminate bias in the analysis of publication trends in research fields, and conducts in-depth trend analysis in the life sciences. The results show that publication record inflation often leads to incorrect identification of field-specific growth. The metric enables a more accurate quantification of research field growth and provides a more reliable decision-making basis for research resource investment and fund allocation.