On the interplay between normalisation, bias, and performance of paper impact metrics

•We evaluate paper-level impact metrics on field bias, time bias, and ranking performance.•We evaluate mean-based, percentile-based, co-citation-based, and post hoc rescaling approaches to normalise citation scores.•Percentile-based citation scores are less field and time biased than mean-normalised citation counts.•No significant difference in ranking performance exists between percentile- and mean-normalised citation scores.•Citation counts are always less time biased but always more field biased than PageRank.