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.
