To publish in Spanish or in any non English language, negative for impact factor and citations

• Main Authors: Angeles Franco-López, Javier Sanz-Valero, Jesús M. Culebras
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Asociación Para el Progreso de la Biomedicina 2016-07-01
• Series: Jounal of Negative and No Positive Results
• Subjects: Bibliometrics; Impact factor; H index
• Online Access: https://www.jonnpr.com/pdf/1005.pdf

The number of citations of an article or its impact factor is greatly biased by the language in which it is written. Most of the journals included in the Web of Science (WOS) are in English. English written articles have much more penetration than articles in other languages. There are three articles in the world literature that have been cited more than 100,000 times, all of them in English. In contrast, the most cited article in Spanish appeared only 561 times. There are 74 Spanish journals indexed in the web of Science, but only four in the first quartile and five in the second quartile. For this reason, scientists are forced to publish in foreign journals. We should devise the system of electronic diffusion of scientific publications in the XXI century as a unique instrument, located in the web, to which articles are conducted. It would not be necessary to know through which journal each article is carried because with its identifying DOI articles can be traced. Impact factor has some drawbacks that shade its equity. The adequate way to evaluate articles would be through the number of times that are cited, being authors judged through their h index.