  China's scientific output has risen precipitously over the past decade; it is
now the world's second-largest producer of scientific papers, behind only the
United States. The quality of China's research is also on the rise (Van
Noorden, 2016). The online visibility and impact of China's research are also
important issues worth exploring. In this study, we investigate the altmetric
performance of publications in the field of Biotechnology and Applied
Microbiology and published by authors from Chinese affiliations. We find that
papers published by those authors from Chinese affiliations have much lower
visibility on the social web than articles from other countries, when there is
no significant difference for the citations. Fewer of China's publications get
tweeted, and those tweeted publications attract less social attention. A
geographical analysis of tweeters shows that scholarly articles get most of
their social attention from the authors' home countries, a finding that is also
confirmed by correlation and regression analysis. This situation, which is
unfavorable for researchers from Chinese affiliations, is caused, in part, by
the inaccessibility of mainstream social networking platforms in mainland
China.
