Since indicators play an increasing role for decisions regarding research policy and management, the issues of their epistemological status and conditions of robustness are important ones. The purpose of this article is to show that the building and interpretation of S&T indicators is a...

Despite its relevance for research funding, few comparable data are available in official R&D statistics on the amount and composition of project funding. This paper discusses in detail the methodology developed in the European Network of Excellence on Research and Innovation Policies PRIME for...

Higher education institutions (HEIs) are crucial to the development of the European Research Area. However, unlike in the USA, the availability of quantitative indicators for individual HEI at the European level is severely limited by several methodological issues, data availability problems and...

This paper explores the characteristics of the institutional databases of six universities in three European countries (Italy, Spain and Switzerland). Its aim is to test the extent to which databases can be considered valuable sources for building positioning indicators to describe different...

This paper presents an approach to mapping a scientific field characterised by conceptual, theoretical and methodological pluralism — communication — in a country characterised by diversity at the socio-political and cultural level: Switzerland. Given the limitations of standard bibliometric...

This section of Research Evaluation includes three papers coming from the International Conference on Science and Technology Indicators organised by the PRIME Network of Excellence in Lugano in November 2006. In their diversity of approaches, they share some basic inspirations of the indicators...

This paper discusses the status of indicators concerning research funding and expenditure and proposes some pathways for further developments. First, I discuss in depth the design of the R&D statistics based on the Frascati manual and its limitations concerning analytical categories, data...

Measuring research output in fields of social sciences and humanities requires particular attention to the specificities of the field, but also to national and cultural contexts. This paper presents an approach adopted in a project constructing an instrument for measuring research output in...

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...