Science, technology, and innovation (ST&I) are fundamental for the progress and well-being of any nation. Developed countries have prioritized them in budgets and policies, and for a long time have collected statistics and indicators of ST&I activities to measure their contribution to development, and to enhance the design and improve the accountability of public policies. Moreover, these indicators have been useful to determine and compare the contribution and relative position of countries in the production of new knowledge.

Even though these indicators have shown to be useful guidelines for developing countries, ST&I in developing countries face different challenges; among them is that most of their activities are financed with public funds, and resources are scarce. There is also an increasing debate regarding the perceived performance of the national systems of innovation of these countries. Thus, special quantitative and qualitative analyses, that consider these particularities, are at prompt.

The idea of this special issue came about at the 1st Latin American Symposium on the Metric Studies of Science and Technology, held in Mexico City on August 28th–30th, 2019. At that seminar, Latin American researchers, policy makers, and scientific policy makers came together to share experiences and research advances on the development of improved and more accountable indicators of ST&I, from the perspective of bibliometrics, informetrics, scientometrics, and webmetrics. The symposium led to a community-wide agreement that measuring ST&I activities and assessing their impact in Latin America required a range of interdisciplinary approaches that needed to be enhanced. This special issue consists of 11 papers that present a sample of current research relative to the production and impact of ST&I in Latin America. All the papers use extensive panel databases of publications and citations, mostly from Web of Science and Scopus, in a wide range of fields of knowledge. Each paper has its own theoretical and empirical contribution, and they all provide an addition to the advancement of our understanding regarding the different aspects that scientometrics reveals about the creation and evolution of new knowledge, and the impact that this new knowledge has on a country, a region and the world. This special issue also reveals that there are ample opportunities for more research in many other areas of knowledge in the region.