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

by Joost L. D. Nelis, Gonçalo Rosas da Silva, Jordi Ortuño, Aristeidis S. Tsagkaris, Benny Borremans, Jana Haslova, Michelle L. Colgrave, Christopher T. Elliott

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.