Research on Disinformation and Fake News in Spanish-Language Communication Journals: Lines of Inquiry, Mapping, and Trends

Abstract

This paper presents a systematic review of Spanish-language scientific literature on disinformation and fake news, published in academic journals in the field of Communication Studies indexed in Latindex. The main objective is to provide an updated and comparative map of the current state of research in this area, with the aim of identifying prevailing thematic lines, editorial patterns, and conceptual frameworks. To this end, two distinct corpora are constructed: one focused on the term desinformación (405 references) and the other on fake news (251 references), both extracted from the Dialnet Plus bibliographic portal using thematic, linguistic, and indexation filters. The methodology combines the analysis of journals and countries of publication, the chronology of the articles, the terminology used in titles, and the thematic classification of the studies. The findings reveal a notable editorial concentration in Spain and a high degree of overlap among the most active journals. Research output intensifies from 2020 onwards, although publications focusing on desinformación show a longer and more academically consolidated trajectory than those on fake news. The most frequent topics include political manipulation, media literacy, health-related disinformation, and the role of digital technologies. While fake news tends to be associated with empirical and technological approaches, desinformación is linked to more structural and critical perspectives. The research provides a comparative map that illustrates the evolution and diversification of research on disinformation.