Data on research publications authored by Spanish institutions between 2016 and 2020 with their associated social media and altmetric mentions, and on researchers affiliated to Spanish institutions whose work is highly mentioned in social media and non-academic outlets. Variables of the publications dataset: id - Unique publication identifier title - Full title of the publication year - Year of publication type - Document type journal - Name of the journal esi - ESI category of the publication influscore - AAS value on March 3, 2021 news - Number of mentions in news media blogs - Number of mentions in blogs policy - Number of mentions in policy reports patent - Number of mentions in patent twitter - Number of mentions in Twitter post_peer - Number of mentions in PubPeer and Publons weibo - Number of mentions in Weibo facebook - Number of mentions in Facebook wikipedia - Number of mentions in Wikipedia google - Number of mentions in Google+ linkedin - Number of mentions in LinkedIn reddit - Number of mentions in Reddit pinterest - Number of mentions in Pinterest f1000 - Number of mentions in F1000 stack_overflow - Number of mentions in Stack Overflow youtube - Number of mentions in YouTube syllabus - Number of mentions in Open Syllabus Project Variables of the top authors dataset: name - Full name of the researcher orcid - ORCID record organization - Name of the institution of affiliation publications - List of publication identifiers (id) connecting with the publications dataset

This work has funded by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation grant number PID2019-109127RB-I00/SRA/10.13039/501100011033