Thanks a lot for your suggestions. I agree that it is better to use the read counts per gene rather than mRNA abundance to calculate the Pearson correlation. However, I am trying to reproduce a paper (https://doi.org/10.1016/j.molp.2018.01.008), in which I found that they analyze the Pearson correlation of mRNA abundance in Fig.1(B).
Now I understand that it is acceptable, but if they use the read counts per gene will be much better,
Besides, I have got continuous variables for my experiment. Can I calculate the Spearman correlation using cor() in R?
What exactly do you wish to correlate? The number of modifications? The location? ...?
Sorry for your confusion. I want to correlation the location of modification sites of nucleotide in mRNA from different samples.