  We introduce a new resistance measurement method that is useful in
characterizing materials with both surface and bulk conduction, such as
three-dimensional topological insulators. The transport geometry for this new
resistance measurement configuration consists of one current lead as a closed
loop that fully encloses the other current lead on the surface, and two voltage
leads that are both placed outside the loop. We show that in the limit where
the transport is dominated by the surface conductivity of the material, the
four-terminal resistance measured from such a transport geometry is
proportional to $\sigma_b/\sigma_s^2$, where $\sigma_b$ and $\sigma_s$ are the
bulk and surface conductivities of the material, respectively. We call this new
type of measurement \textit{inverted resistance measurement}, as the resistance
scales inversely with the bulk resistivity. We discuss possible implementations
of this new method by performing numerical calculations on different geometries
and introduce strategies to extract the bulk and surface conductivities. We
also demonstrate inverted resistance measurements on SmB$_6$, a topological
Kondo insulator, using both single-sided and coaxially-aligned double-sided
Corbino disk transport geometries. Using this new method, we are able to
measure the bulk conductivity, even at low temperatures, where the bulk
conduction is much smaller than the surface conduction in this material.
