Methods to account for citation inflation in research evaluation

Quantitative research evaluation requires measures that are transparent, relatively simple, and free of disciplinary and temporal bias. We document and provide a solution to a hitherto unaddressed temporal bias – citation inflation – which arises from the basic fact that scientific publication is steadily growing at roughly 4% per year. Moreover, because the total production of citations grows by a factor of 2 every 12 years, this means that the...