The recent years have witnessed an extraordinary diversification of the demands for Science and Technology (S&T) indicators for policymaking and strategic decision of the actors involved in S&T policies. New demands have emerged as a consequence of the growing complexity of innovation systems at the regional, national and international level and of the needs of new indicators types to characterize the position and the linkages of individual actors (so-called positioning indicators). Whole new fields of indicators have emerged, like collaboration indicators, web indicators, indicators on human resources and mobility, while even in classical domains like input measurement existing indicators are no longer fully adequate to the needs of policy.

The conference aims to provide a place both for general methodological discussion concerning new indicators, their use in policymaking and the requirements for their production, and for presenting new developments in indicators for specific domains and policy issues, concerning their design, methodology, experimental development and application to policy analysis and decision-making.

Topics and special tracks

Evaluation of research policies and programs: which role for indicators?

Organiser: Emanuela Reale, CNR-CERIS Rome

Indicators for evaluation of research programs and policies are one of the challenges for evidence-based policy making, which needs assessments based on objectives and over time comparable evidences. This track is devoted to contributions focusing on indicators able to support the policy makers understanding of the value and impact of research programs and policies. Papers highlighting the changing role of indicators are also welcome.

Advances in official indicators

Organiser: Alessandra Colecchia, OECD, Paris

This track will be devoted to new indicators of relevance for policy developed by international organizations like OECD, European Commission, Eurostat, as well as by national statistical offices. While these activities are of high interest for the indicators community, presentations can have a stronger descriptive and applied orientation than in the other sessions. Indicators in the areas covered by other conference topics will be preferred.

Linking Academia and Industry

Organisers: Stig Slipersaeter, NIFU STEP, Oslo and Loet Leydesdorff, University of Amsterdam

University-industry-government relations can be considered as drivers of organized knowledge production and control in regions, sectors, or nations. In this track we welcome contributions which focus on geographical studies and evolutionary models, on the one hand, and measurement exercises using and developing relational indicators, on the other. What are knowledge-based systems? How can a knowledge base be indicated? How can knowledge-based systems be generated and strengthened?

Indicators for the measure of research output in social sciences and humanities

Organiser: Peter van den Besselaar, Rathenau Instituut, Den Haag

This track is devoted to approaches and techniques to develop indicators to measure research outputs in SSH, taking into account the multidimensionality of outputs, the different reference spaces and languages and the heterogeneity of the field. Topics can include the development of metrics (for example concerning scientific publications), approaches for data collection and validation by the community itself.

Institutional-level indicators: a new frontier for higher education indicators

Organiser: Ben Jongbloed, CHEPS, University of Twente

Going beyond one-dimensional rankings, this track seeks contributions that address new indicators and related techniques that allow the various stakeholders in higher education and S&T communities to characterize and assess the multi-dimensional performance of individual higher education institutions. Topics include: multi-dimensional classifications, positioning indicators, performance profiles, user-driven ranking tools, and the use of institutional-level indicators in policy analysis and strategy building.

Methods and techniques for the exploitation of heterogeneous data sources

Organiser: Peter van den Besselaar, Rathenau Instituut, Den Haag

This track invites contributions on advances on how to exploit heterogeneous sources for indicators production, like large sample of CVs, publication sets from different sources, etc. Contributions should focus on the use of techniques allowing a large scale exploitation of these sources, to cope with heterogeneity and reduce the amount of manual work, like data mining, automated text searches, semantic tools etc. Papers presenting experiments in this area are particularly welcome.

General session on design of S&T indicators

Organiser: Ghislaine Filliatreau, Observatoire des Sciences et Techniques, Paris.

This track will include original contributions in design and use of STI indicators, focused on the notion of positioning indicators, not included in the other tracks. We particularly invite contributions on following subjects: indicators on human resources and careers; indicators on European Research Area dynamics, internationalization of research; indicators on knowledge dynamics, problem-solving oriented research and emerging scientific fields.