Use of English as a strategy for the internationalization of scientific production in Applied Social Sciences: a case study of SciELO Brazil

English is seen as the “lingua franca” of science because it offers the possibility for researchers from all countries to communicate and exchange information through the same language. There is a growing tendency to publish articles in the English language, reflecting the efforts of scientists, educational institutions and journals to promote the internationalization of their scientific production. The objective of this study was to evaluate if articles in English, published in journals in the SciELO Brazil collection, and belonging to the areas of Applied Social Sciences, tend to receive more citations within the SciELO Citation Index, integrated with the Web of Science, from Clarivate Analytics. For that, metadata and number of citations was collected from articles published in 19 selected journals. As a result, it has been found that there is indeed a trend towards scientific internationalization, given the increase in the number of articles published in English over the years. However, in 14 journals, articles published only in Portuguese or Spanish were the ones that presented the highest citation average, when compared to the other languages. In conclusion, it is pointed out that in the area of Applied Social Sciences, articles published in English tend to be less cited within the SciELO Network. Therefore, although the purpose is to give greater international visibility of Brazilian publications, in some cases, the language may not be able to change the impact of these documents.