IN CANADA, 2012 Appendices - Council of Canadian Academies

6 The State of Science and Technology in Canada, 2012
is therefore said to be a zero sum game: the more one specializes somewhere, the
less one does elsewhere. To ensure that it is a real zero sum game, the publication
numbers used to compute the SI are based on fractional counting.
Fractional counting is used so that a single paper is not counted several times. This
approach avoids the use of total numbers across entities (e.g., researcher, institution,
region, country) that add up to more than the total numbers of papers, as is the
case with full counting. Ideally, each author listed on a paper should be attributed
a fraction of the paper that corresponds to his or her level of participation in
the experiment compared to the other authors. Unfortunately, no reliable means
exists for calculating the relative effort of authors on SI.
The SI is formulated as follows:
SI = (X S /X T )
(N S /N T )
Where:
X S = Publications from entity X in a given research area (e.g., Canadian
papers in biology);
X T = Publications from entity X in a reference set of papers (e.g., total
Canadian papers);
N S = Publications from reference entity N in a given research area (e.g.,
world papers in biology);
N T = Publications from reference entity N in a reference set of papers
(e.g., total world papers).
An index value above 1.0 means that a given entity is specialized relative to
the reference entity, whereas an index value below 1.0 means the reverse.
Number of Co-Publications
A co-publication is defined as a publication that was co-authored by different
authors. When counting the number of co-publications from a country in which
the co-authors are from at least two different countries, the number of international
co-publications for this country is obtained. When counting the number of
co-publications from a province in which the co-authors are from at least two
different provinces, the number of inter-provincial co-publications for this