Special issue: papers from the 20th International Conference on Science and Technology Indicators

The 20th International Conference on Science and Technology Indicators (STI) took place from September 2nd to 4th, 2015 at the Università della Svizzera italiana in Lugano. The conference series, originally hosted in 1988 by CWTS, University of Leiden, became an annual event in 2010 under the auspices of the European Network of Indicator Designers (ENID; www.enid-europe.org), thus broadening its scope to different areas of the development and use of STI indicators, including policy analysis and evaluation, studies of research funding and governance, and indicators for the study of higher education systems and institutions. With the attendance of roughly 140 participants from 35 different countries, the breadth and the reach of the conference series was on full display. While dealing with the development of Science and Technology Indicators, each STI conference focuses on a specific topic or approach in order to provide new directions and impulses to the community in the field. In Lugano, the conference particularly discussed the development and use of S&T indicators to characterize and understand the behaviour of research organizations, including Higher Education Institutions, Public Research Organizations (PROs) and Research Funding Organizations. And thus, it reflected a longstanding process of development of indicators to characterize the profile and the position of organizations in the broader field of science and technology, the so-called positioning indicators (Lepori et al. 2008). Large initiatives in this direction include the development of databases on higher education institutions, the use of bibliometric indicators for the creation of ratings and rankings of institutional research performance, new developments to measure and assess academic patenting, the development of datasets covering different aspects of