AO: The authors do not talk about practice at all.
AO: The authors talk about how lack of lab materials, etc. may incentivize greater collaboration in certain fields.
AO: The paper does not talk about data practices.
AO: They write: “Differences in the propensity of countries to collaborate internationally can be explained partly by intellectual influence: The less developed the scientific infrastructure of a given country, the higher the tendency for inter- national coauthorshipcollaboration.We haveoutlinedfurtherreasons forthis trend: With increasing specialization of science, scientists from countries with a small scientific output have to look for collaborative partners abroad; and there is also the need for cost sharing.Nevertheless, there is a large vari- ation in the rates of international coauthorship collaboration between coun- tries, and the relationship between the size of scientific output and the rate of international collaboration is relatively weak.“
AO: The paper puzzles over why there might be more collaboration in a theoretical field like mathematics over others where they assumed material constraints like lack of expensive lab materials would lead to more collaboration.
AO: The paper did not discuss this.
“international (trans-national) institutional co-authorship from a select database from 1981 - 86 that looks at Earth and space, Math, Physics, Biomedicine; Biology; Chemistry; Engineering and tech; clinical medicine publications.”
AO: The authors appear to grow out of a dependency theory mindset arguing: “A closer analysis of the collaborative patterns of individual countries also points to relations of intellectual dependence: One country might be an intellectual center while others are more or less dependent on it.” However, they fail to do an in-depth analysis of micro or macro power relations.
AO: Authors note that attention needs to be paid to external factors like communications channels, governmental initiatives, travel money, intergovernmental science programs, and international politics. They note “regionally based factors such as geopolitics, history, language, and cultural similarity seem to be very important for the collaborative networks.” However they do not incorporate colonialism or Bretton Woods policies that decimated scholarly output in their analysis.
AO: Authors categorize the existing literature about collaboration around economic, cognitive and social factors to explain it. They argue that attention needs to be paid to external factors like communications channels, governmental initiatives, travel money, intergovernmental science programs, and international politics.
AO: Authors are interested in country-to-country differences in co-authorship and note that “we pay particular attention to factors that influence networks of international scientific collaboration between countries, including geopolitical and historical factors and language” but they do not discuss colonialism and structural adjustment policies which were significant in scholarly production.
AO: Authors talk about periphery and core a la dependency theory.
AO: The authors depend a lot on the notion of a country’s “size” (the number of papers in the database they use). They develop a formula and determine that “size” is only a small reason for why a country collaborates with another.