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...

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 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...

The article investigates the participatory co-development of suitable indicators for the assessment of internationalization of funding agencies (FAs). Our research questions are: How can we measure different functions and institutional characteristics using a participatory process? What and who...

The approach adopted in the design of a system of continuous evaluation and monitoring for COST, the European mechanism for the stimulation of co-operation in scientific and technical research, is described. The emphasis is on the derivation of a framework which asks questions about the...

We describe the development and testing of a framework to characterize researchers individually (a profile) and in aggregate (as types) at the first stage, baseline step of a controlled, two-stage study of public research funding agency impacts. Our framework characterizes researcher attitudes...

The aim of the paper is to control the reliability of peer review when evaluating academic research in the Three-Year Research Assessment Exercise developed in Italy. Our analysis covers four disciplinary sectors: chemistry, biology, humanities and economics. The results provide evidence that...

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 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...