Purpose -This study explores the link creating behaviour of European highly cited scientists based upon their online lists of publications and their institutional personal websites. Methods -A total of 1,525 highly cited scientists working at European institutions were first identified. Outlinks from their online lists of publications and their personal websites pointing to a pre-defined collection of popular academic websites and file types were then gathered by a personal web crawler.

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... -Perhaps surprisingly, a larger proportion of social scientists provided at least one outlink compared to the other disciplines investigated. By far the most linked-to file type was PDF and the most linked-to type of target website was scholarly databases, especially the Digital Object Identifier website. Health science and life science researchers mainly linked to scholarly databases, while scientists from engineering, hard sciences and social sciences linked to a wider range of target websites. Both book sites and social network sites were rarely linked to, especially the former. Hence, whilst successful researchers frequently use the Web to point to online copies of their articles, there are major disciplinary and other differences in how they do this. Research limitations -The number of women in the sample is very low, and the sample inherits any discipline-bias and language-bias of the database used (ISIHighlyCited.com) for the identification of the scientists. For part of the analysis, we did not analyze all links created by the scientists, but only outlinks pointing to specific types of websites that were common hyperlink targets from researchers' web pages. Practical implications -The differences found in the way that scientists use the web to publicize research will inform the design of future web based research evaluation and open access indicators so that they can be sensitive to different but valid strategies for web research publicity. The understanding of how successful scientists use the web to publicize their research and which web resources have the most success in each discipline will also help current researchers to plan and evaluate their own web strategies. Originality/value -This is the first study to analyse the outlinking patterns of highly cited researchers' institutional web presences in order to identify which web resources they use to provide access to their publications.