Towards field-adjusted production: Estimating research productivity from a zero-truncated distribution

•Waring based estimation of the zero-class of a zero-truncated publication frequency distribution (and estimates of publications per researcher based thereon) bear real significance.•Waring estimations are reasonably stable (given a sufficiently large data set).•The methodology should be used to produce more relevant citation averages per unit.•Establishing Field Adjusted Production values will provide the basis for a new type of ranking of universities. Measures of research productivity (e.g. peer reviewed papers per researcher) is a fundamental part of bibliometric studies, but is often restricted by the properties of the data available. This paper addresses that fundamental issue and presents a detailed method for estimation of productivity (peer reviewed papers per researcher) based on data available in bibliographic databases (e.g. Web of Science and Scopus). The method can, for example, be used to estimate average productivity in different fields, and such field reference values can be used to produce field adjusted production values. Being able to produce such field adjusted production values could dramatically increase the relevance of bibliometric rankings and other bibliometric performance indicators. The results indicate that the estimations are reasonably stable given a sufficiently large data set.