Sparking attention on African swine fever research on social media platform: An altmetric evaluation of top 100 highly cited articles

African swine fever (ASF) is one of the highly contagious diseases of pigs that affect both domestic and wild pigs. The primary purpose of this research was to evaluate the online social attention on the ASF research to inform the research scientists and key stakeholders in the field by reporting the concise information of the most influential articles, social engagement, and impacts of the research. This study employed the altmetrics tool to evaluate the research papers. Bibliographic data of 100 articles were collected from Scopus; altmetric data was collected from the Altmetric.com database and analyzed using SPSS and Tableau. The articles were mainly mentioned on Twitter, followed by News Outlets and significant readers on Mendeley. Pearson correlation coefficients revealed a weak and insignificant correlation between Scopus Citation and Altmetric Attention Score (AAS). Mendeley Readership and Scopus Citation were moderately correlated. However, there was a significant positive correlation between the AAS and Mendeley readership. Using altmetric tools, the paper is the first research to shed light on the characteristics of ASF on social media. •The study employed altmetric tools to evaluate African Swine Fever (ASF) research.•Research publications received significant social media attention.•Twitter is the primary social media platform for disseminating research highlights.•Research articles have a considerable number of readers on the Mendeley platform.•Significant correlation between Altmetric Attention, Citation, and Mendeley reading.