## 1 Introduction
In a recent study focused on the field of education, a bibliometric analysis carried out on the Web of Science (WoS) has confirmed that the most prolific period is 2015-2017, with Spain being the country with the highest growth production in this field [33], followed by Taiwan [37]. This latest study also found that Taiwan University of Science and Technology is the main institution producing related research, and that [PERSON] and [PERSON] are the most important authors [37]. In a bibliometric study on AR carried out for the field of business administration, two distinct periods were differentiated in terms of the amount of scholarship produced; the most prolific period corresponds to 2012-2016 [35]. It has been found that quantitative studies predominate [38], especially in communication and presentation formats (moreso than articles [3]), with English being the most widely used language [33]. A combined bibliometric study between AR and M-learning on the WoS found that there is a great variety of main topics being analyzed, with the concept of the phenomenon, the development of new AR methodologies, motivations, special relocations, and the subjects in which AR is implemented being the most popular [32]. A bibliometric study in the specific field of education highlighted that \"learning/academic achievement\", \"motivation\", and \"attitude\" are the most examined variables [38]. The motivation of this study was to investigate the concept of AR in high-impact literature focused on higher education from a novel methodological perspective, with the purpose of achieving new results and deepening existing ones. The structure of this work follows the methodological process of bibliometric studies. After the presentation of the state of the matter in the analyzed literature, this manuscript continues by drafting the materials and methods used during the investigation, formulating the justification and objectives of the study, and explaining the procedure and data collection. Then, the results related to performance and scientific production, structural and thematic development, the thematic evolution of the terms, and the authors with the highest relevance index are presented. Finally, we present a discussion of the results of the scientific literature we found and offer a set of final conclusions for the entire research process. This study is limited to analyzing AR in higher education, specifically in the Web of Science, which is the only database we explore. The reason for this study lies in the need to lay the foundations for the scientific development of AR in a university environment, since no precedent has been found in the specialized literature on the state of the question formulated in this investigation. This is the main problem to be solved in this research paper. Due to the relevance assumed by this emerging technology, and given the benefits of its use in learning spaces, this study is focused on the analysis of scientific productions on augmented reality in higher education (ARHE). The objectives set out in this study are focused on:  
1. Evaluating the performance of and scientific productions on ARHE. 2. Establishing the scientific evolution of ARHE in the specialized literature. 3. Discovering the most important topics in the scientific literature on ARHE. 4. Identifying the most relevant authors who study ARHE.