The present work seeks to analyse the altmetric performance of Brazilian publications authored by researchers who are productivity scholarship holders (PQ) of the National Council of Scientific and Technological Development (CNPq). It was considered, within the scope of this research, the PQs in activity in October, 2017 (n = 14.609). The scientific production registered on Lattes was collected via GetLattesData and filtered by articles from academic journals published between 2016 and October 2017 that hold the Digital Object Identifier (n = 99064). The online attention data are analysed according to their distribution by density and variation; language of the publication and field of knowledge; and by average performance of the type of source that has provided its altmetric values. The density evidences the long tail behavior of the variable, with most part of the articles with altmetrics score = 0, while few articles have a high index. The average of the online attention indicates a better performance of articles written in English and belonging to the Health and Biological Sciences field of knowledge. As for the sources, there was a good performance from Mendeley, followed by Twitter and a low coverage from Facebook