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

• Published in: PloS one 2022-05, Vol.17 (5), p.e0268433-e0268433
• Main Authors: Nelis, Joost L D, Rosas da Silva, Gonçalo, Ortuño, Jordi, Tsagkaris, Aristeidis S, Borremans, Benny, Haslova, Jana, Colgrave, Michelle L, Elliott, Christopher T
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Alzheimer's disease; Bias; Bibliometrics; Biology and Life Sciences; Computer and Information Sciences; Data collection; Decision analysis; Decision making; Ecology and Environmental Sciences; Economic aspects; Inflation (Finance); Information management; Life sciences; Management; Medicine and Health Sciences; Metabolomics; Microplastics; Proteomics; Publication bias; Publication output; Research and Analysis Methods; Transcriptomics; Trend analysis; Trends
• ISSN: 1932-6203; 1932-6203
• DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0268433

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