This study aims to analyse the temporal diffusion of highest Altmetric Attention Scores (AAS) articles on social media over a 5-year period between 2015 and 2020. Altmetric timelines for 14,842 articles with the top AAS were collected using Dimensions and Altmetric Explorer. The findings revealed that, except for policy and patent citations, most altmetric indicators exhibited a declining trend starting from the year of publication. Among all indicators, Facebook mentions showed the steepest decline. The results indicate that over 60% of mentions on platforms such as news outlets, blogs, X (formerly Twitter) and Facebook occurred within the publication year, whereas patent citations continued to grow over the 5-year period. A significant negative correlation was observed between the number of years since publication and most altmetric indicators, except for + policy and patent citations. Among the social media pairs, the strongest correlations were found between news and blogs, policy and patents, X and Facebook and Wikipedia and X.
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