Language as a Vehicle for the Dissemination of Science: Analysis of the Visibility and Impact of Research through Google Bibliometrics

Abstract

The emergence of Google in the field of bibliometrics through personal and collective indicators (researchers and journals) has affected the references of those who rely on impact factors and the counting of citations, particularly within the social sciences and the humanities. Google’s lists of the 100 most cited publications in nine different languages, which were updated in 2012 and 2013, allow us to carry out comparative analyses to assess the impact of the Spanish language in the dissemination of science based on the journals’ h and h5 indexes. Method: this study is based on the analysis of Google Scholar data, particularly the universal h5index (μ) and the universal h5median (μm), in order to identify the areas of the international dissemination of science in which the impact of the Spanish language is the most and least intense.