AO: The authors are thinking about transnational institutional co-authorship as “collaboration” (not individual co-authorship). “we assume that in most cases coauthorship indicates a fairly active cooperation between the partners, closer and more active than the exchange of material, information, and comments, which shows up, for example, in acknowledgements.” They are interested in understanding country-to-country differences in rates of international co-authorship.
AO: The authors focus primarily on meso level analysis given that their focus on institutional co-authorship. They lack any sort of nano or micro level analysis and mention legal and political infrastructures but do not provide any analysis at this level. They are limited by their data which is a dataset of co-authorship that they are using. The 30 countries they are using in their analysis as stand-in for the world do not include any African countries and only include 2 Latin American countries. They are primarily European and “Western” countries which the authors defend by saying that there was no data on the other countries.