Designing indicators for policy decisions: challenges, tensions and good practices: introduction to a special issue

This special issue collects six papers (out of 80 submissions) from the Science and Indicators Conference organized by the European Network of Indicators Designers (ENID) in March 2010 in Paris, France. They cover quite different aspects of design of indicators for policy decisions, ranging from internationalization policies in research (Edler and Flanagan, 2011), to indicators to support the evaluation processes of funding agencies (Poti and Cerulli, 2011; Neufeld and Von Ins, 2011), to the analysis of publication outputs of higher education institutions (Reale, De Filippo, Gomez, Lepori, Poti, Primeri, Probst and Sanz Casado, 2011) and, finally, to two papers dealing with the highly contested issue of indicators to measure research output in social sciences and humanities (De Jong, Van Arensbergen, Daemen, Van der Meulen and Van den Besselaar, 2011; Probst, Lepori, De Filippo and Ingenhoff, 2011). Copyright , Beech Tree Publishing.