Oliver BrendelFeb 1
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 .
Show threadOliver Brendel
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/..
Feb 8 at 4:12pmWeb
Show threadOliver BrendelFeb 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/..
Show threadOliver BrendelFeb 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/..
Show threadOliver BrendelFeb 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/..
Show thread𝐬𝐭𝐞𝐯𝐄 🌼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".
Show threadOliver BrendelFeb 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 🙂