Measuring the relative intensity of collaboration with fractional counting methods

With the rapid globalization of scientific research and the increasing tendency of countries to co-fund research programs and projects, measuring international collaboration has become a key focus in the field of scientometrics and in policy documents. The relative intensity of collaboration (RIC) has been introduced as a new approach to measure the activity in bilateral relations relative to all such relations within a network. This study proposes the application of fractional counting as an alternative to full counting methods to calculate the RIC index, thereby shifting the emphasis from the perspective of participation in collaboration to the perspective of contribution to collaboration. At the level of countries, the change of perspective corresponds to a policy perspective in which questions about the prioritization of partners and resources spent on international scientific collaboration might be asked. To illustrate the new approach, we present examples of collaboration between China, the United States, and other countries within the global research network.