Abstract Researchers’ performance is often evaluated quantitatively through metrics like the number of scientific papers, the number of citations these received, and the H-index, perpetuating the “Publish or Perish” culture. Yet such metrics have inherent biases favoring older, established researchers and fail to account for disciplinary differences or temporal relevance of contributions. To address this inequity, we aimed to create a global, age- and field-adjusted reference for evaluating scientific productivity. We developed a comprehensive worldwide reference database of researchers using publication and citation data from Scopus. The reference dataset includes 507,233 researchers from across the globe and facilitates the calculation of expected values for H-index, annual citations, and recent publications (within the past 5 years) for each percentile in every discipline. To account for disciplinary differences, we incorporated diverse publication types into the analysis tailored to each domain. The benchmarks utilized were stratified by career stage, assessed at each year after a researcher’s first publication. A composite score was developed to rank publication performance into deciles (D1–D10), where D1 represents the highest level of achievement. Importantly, only data from researchers within the same career stage and same scientific domain are used for comparison, ensuring fair and context-sensitive evaluations. To enhance accessibility, we established a web portal ( www.scientometrics.org/scopus ) to facilitate researcher benchmarking. This age- and discipline-normalized international database promotes the application of responsible metrics, offering a robust framework for global scientometric rankings. By providing an online analysis platform, we enable researchers, institutions, and policymakers to determine expected levels of scholarly output at the individual level while fostering fairness and equity in academic evaluation.
Győrffy et al. (Mon,) studied this question.