Science, research, and innovation infospheres in Google results of the Ibero-American countries

Abstract

The growing digitalization of scientific research practices is reflected in the content that academic and governmental institutions put on their websites, many of which are not optimized so that their contents reach visibility in search results of Google. Through the mapping of search engine results, this article analyzes the visibility of Ibero-American governmental, educational and research institutions in the results of Google in relation to a group of keywords related to the areas of Science, Research and Innovation. By analyzing the results of these pages in the search results in a specific period we can determine that, although few exceptions, the algorithms used by Google increase the visibility of educational and research institutions in Ibero-America (IA) along with those of each country in function of the national search option offered by the search engine. The indicators obtained both for web presence and web visibility indicate that pages that appear more frequently in the first positions in IA countries are not owned by national institutions, but from other countries. Moreover, we have observed that governmental and educational institutions are most visible than research institutions. While previously social networks are not so far popular for this type of institutions, they are recently gaining positions. However, this study is exploratory and a longitudinal research would eliminate fluctuations of web data.