Using Relative Tie Strength to Identify Core Teams of Scientific Research

In China, it has long become imperative for the management of education, science and technology to build up high-level teams of scientific and technological innovation. Scientifically and accurately identifying core scientific research teams is an important prerequisite for cultivating and building such teams. The absolute threshold method (e.g., c-level clique at, n-clique, k-core) is the prevailing means of identifying core teams and their core members. Multiple factors such as "the preference-dependent effect", "the apostle effect" and "the star effect", and the cooperative relationship between the researchers could be considered. This study, based on the co-authorship network, found that not choosing the absolute threshold properly could easily lead to poor identification of core members of some teams. Even worse, when the absolute threshold is too large, this "uniform" evaluation criterion of tie strength results in the elimination of some core teams in some disciplines. This paper uses the relative tie strength to identify core scientific research teams from a new perspective, which can effectively avoid the situation of some core team members being ignored because of the mandatory requirements of the absolute tie strength among members, and can also solve the challenge of threshold selections for identifying different teams.