Social media attention of the ESI highly cited papers: An Altmetrics-based overview

The bibliographic database Web of Science (WoS) provides information about the top scientific actors through its Essential Science Indicators (ESI) product. One of the most important reports is the highly cited papers (HCP), that shows the Top 1% of papers cited in the 22 research field and publication year. New metrics based on online attention, the Altmetrics, have appeared. Using these metrics as a reference, our primary aim in this work is to offer an overview of the social media attention of the HCP. To do so, a match between the 148,767 WoS documents and their Altmetrics scores was performed using their DOIs in Altmetric.com (94,147 records). Then, a descriptive and correlation analysis were performed to describe the results. This analysis shows that Twitter is the leading social platform in which the HCP are disseminated and a source for News. Facebook is the third one, but probably it is not preferable for scientists. Our analysis also indicates that there are research fields with higher social attention and are those with a scientific output more transferable to society. The linkage between basic research and societal impact (patent and policy documents) seems to be low.