What are baselines?
Baselines are measures of cumulative citations per paper across large groups of papers that provide expected citation rates for groups of papers in a specific field and year. Since citation frequency is highly skewed, with many infrequently cited papers and relatively few highly cited papers, average citation rates should not be interpreted as representing the central tendency of the distribution, but rather as guidelines or benchmarks. Similarly, percentiles, or other fixed percentage cuts, indicate the citation rates for specific top segments of the citation distribution. Thus baselines provide comparative averages and percentiles provide comparative proportions.
