This research analyses impersonalization as a mitigation strategy in Spanish and German papers by comparison of the differentconstructions used in each languages. We have carried out an empirical contrastive study of twenty academic papers about politeness, ten in Spanish and ten in German. The linguistic resources used in each speech community are examined in order to identify which impersonal mitigation strategies appear in each of the analyzed languages and to contrast the frequency in the papers of our corpus. The research results corroborate our hypothesis that the most frequent impersonal mitigation strategy in Spanish is the one used with personal marks, whereas in German the preferred strategies are forms without an agent.