Evidence never lies: introduction to a special issue on New Frontiers in Evaluation.

During the past several years, policy-makers have become increasingly aware that the success of their efforts to finance and promote long-term research is dependent not only on individual programmes, institutions and infrastructure, but also on ‘portfolios’ and ‘systems’ of programmes and interventions that interact. Held in Vienna during April 2006, the conference New Frontiers in Evaluation brought together policy-makers, programme managers, scientists and evaluation experts from a variety of disciplines, and managers of science funds from around the world to address such concerns. The small collection of papers from the conference in this issue presents a select set of important issues that permeate the current debate and the evaluation frontier in terms of both conceptualisation and practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]