Mastodawn

Florian Massip Feb 5

From a recent post looking for PhD theses databases across Europe, I got lots of boosts (thanks) but only returns from very few European countries. So I wonder : how many active scientists (lets say having published one peer-reviewed paper in the last five years) are on mastodon from the different EU countries ?
Pools only have 10 choices, so more countries are in the next post 🙂
please boost mainly on servers with a science theme
And if I have missed any hashtags that are followed by many scientists, please add
#AcademicChatter #academic #academics #AcademicFedi #EUscience #EUresearch
#Researcher

Austria

7.6%

Belgium

8.8%

Bulgaria

1.2%

Croatia

0.6%

Cyprus

0.6%

Czech Republic

2.9%

Denmark

4.7%

Estonia

1.2%

Finland

22.2%

France

50.3%

Poll ended at Feb 8 at 9:58am.

Oliver Brendel Feb 1

second set of EU countries :

Germany

54.8%

Greece

0.7%

Hungary

0%

Republic of Ireland

2.2%

Italy

4.4%

Latvia

1.5%

Lithuania

0%

Luxembourg

0%

Malta

0%

Netherlands

36.3%

Poll ended at Feb 8 at 10:00am.

Oliver Brendel Feb 1

third set of EU contries, I have added UK and Switzerland, because they collaborate in EU projects 😉

Poland

11.6%

Portugal

4.3%

Romania

0%

Slovakia

0%

Slovenia

2.9%

Spain

21.7%

Sweden

15.9%

+ United Kingdom

31.9%

+ Switzerland

11.6%

Poll ended at Feb 8 at 10:02am.

Shayeshayela Feb 1

@olibrendel Well this makes me sad as I am actively applying to do an interdisciplinary PhD in Environmental Studies and Sustainability in Portugal this Fall.

Oliver Brendel Feb 1

@shayeshayela Yes, well, sorry. You could start a poll about masters/PhD students on Mastodon 😉

MalcolmMielle Feb 4

@olibrendel most of my scientific contacts are on LinkedIn and a quick post by me there showed that exactly two were on Mastodon 😅

Aslak Raanes Feb 5

@olibrendel Where is Norway (and Iceland)?

Oliver Brendel Feb 5

@aslakr well, not an EU member state, but you are right, should have added Norway and iceland. Ahhhh , am really embarrassed.
Norwegian and Icelandic scientists, please add a a comment here and I will add to the complete stats. Thanks.

@olibrendel Shæme øn you for forgetting our northern neighbours… 😃

Will Deakin Feb 6

@olibrendel I have published a peer review paper in the last five years. I'm not sure it makes me a scientist though.

@olibrendel just an option for non-scientists who want to see the results of the poll and couldn't vote 😁

inform me of the results of these polls

66.7%

purple

33.3%

Poll ended at Feb 8 at 10:13am.

@webhat Don't forget scientists outside the EU! (That said, as an Australian, I'm holding out hope that we'll be honourary Europeans soon.)

@aps absolutely, don't want to mess up the poll, and they should vote too 😁

Francesco P Lovergine

@olibrendel I wonder if the sampling is biased by your connections, there are simply too many contacts from Germany and Netherlands.

Oliver Brendel Feb 5

@gisgeek biased certainly, but not on my connections or followers, but perhaps by the people that follow my hashtags. But that should have only been in the beginning, but given the number of boosts, some with a couple of thousands of followers ... but clearly, the end results should only be interpreted as representatif of this survey.

Fionnáin Feb 8

@gisgeek @olibrendel I think the nature of federated social media means there are a lot of reasons your sample will be badly biased. For example, many non-English speakers choose to filter out anything posted in English. Also, even many boosts can still reach only a small pool if there are lots of shared connections.

While I find this poll broadly interesting, I think what it really answers is how many researchers are in your broad local feed, and not reflective how many are on mastodon.

Oliver Brendel Feb 4

150 responses right now to my survey of EU scientists on Mastodon. ⬆️ thats already great and thanks for boosting, but there must be more.
It still runs for 3 days
Any hashtags, networks etc I have missed to bring more scientists in ? Perhaps some country specific hashtags and networks ?
Please reply and add hashtags
Thanks
#AcademicChatter

Sandra de Jong ⁂Feb 4

@olibrendel @Bibliothecaris

Babette Knauer Feb 5

@sandradejong @olibrendel Last year, we conducted research on academic staff engagement on Mastodon. Maybe you'll find some data in there useful? Summary: https://zenodo.org/records/15582840; quantitative analysis incl. demographics: https://zenodo.org/records/15583529. Good luck with the survey!

PROJECT SUMMARY: Exploring Academic Staff Engagement on Mastodon

This research project explores the role of Mastodon in academic communication. Sparked by a shift away from X/Twitter due to concerns over misinformation and harassment, Mastodon has become a growing space for scholarly exchange. Despite this trend, little is known about how academics engage with the platform. We conducted this study to understand academic staff's perceptions, motivations, usage patterns, and the platform’s potential benefits and challenges. The project employed a mixed-methods approach, resulting in a three-part study comprising (1) a literature review, (2) a quantitative survey, and (3) qualitative interviews. In this project summary, we briefly present the main results.

Zenodo

Oliver Brendel Feb 5

@sandradejong @babetteknauer great, thanks a lot for sharing ! I'll have a look. It's probably less biased than my survey here 😁

Oliver Brendel Feb 9

@babetteknauer @sandradejong Very interesting data-set. If I understand correctly, your survey concerns academic staff who followed the " University of Groningen Library's Mastodon account"; so the 275 respondents who marked "Europe" can be anywhere in Europe, not only in the Netherlands ?

Babette Knauer Feb 9

@olibrendel @sandradejong The survey was shared through our account, i.e. with our followers, but it was also reshared a lot. Respondents are thus not necessarily our followers, so their location most likely extends the Netherlands, we didn't collect country-specific information. See also chapter "Survey distribution and sampling" in the quantitative analysis part.

David Chavalarias - FR Feb 7

@olibrendel hi, I am a researcher from @cnrs and I am developing something for you 🙂 http://OpenPortability.org a free open source platform that maps social web users and allows data portability from X to Mastodon.

It allows referencing scientists and making them connectable on Mastodon. A full area is dedicated to scientists on the social web map which can be explored anonymously on https://openportability.org/fr/discover (laptop required for this part)

Vidéo tutorial ⬇️
https://iscpif.fr/openportability/social-web-gps

⏳To appear on the map, registration takes less than 1min.

OpenPortability

Libérez vos espaces numériques

Oliver Brendel Feb 8

After seven days, here are the final results (thanks to all participants up to the last minute), recalculated across the three difference surveys.
Overall 375 responses, only two countries around 20% (France/Germany), two around 10% (Finland/Netherlands), UK at 5,9%, all other countries have at least one respondent or up to 5% , except Hungary, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malta, Romania, Slovakia, where zero votes were counted. So in this survey of EU scientists, who were in these seven days actively following science related hashtags, and covered by the 263 boosts, five countries represented over 70% of the respondents, and 18 countries the remaining 30%. There will be some more follow up posts
However overall, given that the for me impressive number of 375 respondents is probably just a fraction of EU scientists on Mastodon, the EU coverage is quite impressive.
I would propose, for subjects concerning EU scientists, to follow the existing but relatively rarely used #EUScientists
#AcademicChatter
1/..

Oliver Brendel Feb 8

Detailed Results in percentages: Austria (3.6%),Belgium (4.1%),Bulgaria (0.5%),Croatia (0.5%),Cyprus (0.5%),Czech Republic (1.4%),Denmark (2.3%),Estonia (0.5%),Finland (10.0%),France (22.8%),Germany (19.8%),Greece (0.4%),Hungary (0.0%),Republic of Ireland (0.7%),Italy (1.4%),Latvia (0.4%),Lithuania (0.0%),Luxembourg (0.0%),Malta (0.0%),Netherlands (13.0%),Poland (2.2%),Portugal (0.7%),Romania (0.0%),Slovakia (0.0%),Slovenia (0.6%),Spain (4.0%),Sweden (2.9%),United Kingdom (5.9%),Switzerland (2.2%)
2/..

Oliver Brendel Feb 8

Detailed Results in votes : Austria(14),Belgium(15),Bulgaria(2),Croatia(2),Cyprus(2),Czech Republic (5),Denmark(9),Estonia(2),Finland(38),France(86),Germany(74),Greece(1),Hungary(0),Republic of Ireland (3),Italy(5),Latvia(1),Lithuania(0),Luxembourg(0),Malta(0),Netherlands(49),Poland(8),Portugal(3),Romania(0),Slovakia(0),Slovenia(2),Spain(15),Sweden(11),United Kingdom (22),Switzerland(8)
3/..

Oliver Brendel Feb 8

A word on bias : clearly this survey accounts only for scientists that were actively following from 2. to 9. February 2026 the science and academia related hashtags from the first post, which are in English, or were reached by the over 260 boosts, which were not only in English. The aim was not to get some robust numbers of #EUScientists on Mastodon, but to get a rough idea of coverage. Many of the people who boosted had over a hundred followers, some over a thousand. Difficult to say how much overlap there was (the possibility of a detailed analysis of all followers of all boosters would clearly be interesting), but with a mean of 200 non-overlapping followers, this survey might have reached 50.000 people or more (some boosts were organizational account with several thousand followers). Thanks for several links of other studies with a similar aim, I will have a look and report back here :-)
4/..

𝐬𝐭𝐞𝐯𝐄 🌼Feb 8

@olibrendel ...and you were not asking about scientists in general but "having published one peer-reviewed paper in the last five years". There are scientific fields in some countries where it's uncommon to publish in peer-reviewed papers but they are still working as a scientist. So this was more about focusing on "natural science" and a kind of somehow excluding "Humanities".

Oliver Brendel Feb 9

@stevE well, might be, but no humanities scientist among the participants or boosters (and there clearly were) has complained about this suggested ('let's say") restriction 🙂

climbertobby Feb 1

@olibrendel As first author or any co-author?

Oliver Brendel Feb 1

@climbertobby any co-author

Cerstin Mahlow Feb 2

@olibrendel „from“ or „in“? I can tick both as my two countries appear in different posts :)

Oliver Brendel Feb 3

@CerstinMahlow I would say "in" , reflecting thus your place of work, rather than your origins. Same as yourself, and probably as also the case for many other scientists, my "in" and "from" are also not the same :-)

[email protected]Feb 6

@olibrendel Greetings, may I ask, does the question >> how many active scientists (lets say having published one peer-reviewed paper in the last five years) are on mastodon from the different EU countries ?<< in itself not carry the improbability answer within?

I think it does.

Oliver Brendel Feb 7

@Unknowable I do not quite understand your concernc, can you explain more ? Perhaps it depends on the objective, mine is to see if from a researchers side all EU countries are represented equally on Mastodon or not. I'm looking for proportions, rather than find out absolute numbers

[email protected]Feb 7

@olibrendel I guess it is about the sample size you can relate to, compared to 30.000 servers peak. I do not think you will get robust enough data to answer that question. Consider that this is due to its decentralized, and ever-changing nature, you cannot even know how man servers have a science theme.

Egon Willighagen Feb 7

@olibrendel PhD theses are notoriously hard to find. Where are you collecting them? Would be awesome to link to PhD theses from platforms like https://academictree.org/ and with @wikidata

The Academic Family Tree

Oliver Brendel Feb 7

@wikidata @egonw in France, all Phds are registered in doctoral schools, and the database they use is national, so its quite easy, and therefore not only containts finished, published theses but also ongoing theses

Egon Willighagen Feb 7

@olibrendel @wikidata in NL you are lucky (tho it happens more and more) to find them in university databases/repositories. But metadata is not systematically aggregated making them relatively hard to find. Belgium PhD thesis I really struggled with. It makes making academic trees non-trivial, but happy with how #wikidata has been helping with getting information together