Publishing your first study on Prolific

Everything you need to know to run your first study on Prolific

How does Prolific work?

• What is Prolific?
• Can I create surveys using Prolific?
• Who can post studies on Prolific?
• How do participants find out about my study?

Setting up a study

• Creating a study on Prolific
• What do each of the Basic Details mean?
• Setting the Maximum Allowed Time
• Can I ask Participants for their Personal Information/Identifiers?
• Estimating your study's completion time

Integrating with your study/survey: participant IDs and completion URLs

• Recording participant IDs in your study/survey
• Recording participants as complete on Prolific

Choosing your target respondents

• Can I prescreen for certain demographics or target certain participants? Which demographic filters do you offer?
• Can I screen participants within my survey?

Previewing and publishing

• Previewing your study
• Device compatibility
• Running a pilot study
• Can I change any details of my study after it is published?

Survey Software/Integrations

How to use Prolific with your favorite survey and experiment software

Compatible survey software

• What survey/experimental software is compatible with Prolific?

Qualtrics

• Qualtrics Integration Guide
• Qualtrics survey template

Gorilla

• Gorilla Integration Guide

Google Forms

• Google Forms Integration Guide

Typeform

• Typeform Integration Guide

Managing studies and submissions

Updating your studies, reviewing submissions, bonus payment, etc

Editing studies

• Adding participants to a live study
• Changing the eligibility criteria of a live study
• Deleting a study

Managing study statuses

• Pausing and stopping a study
• Estimated and average reward per hour

Submission statuses

• Awaiting review
• Returned
• Timed out
• Rejected
• Active
• Approved

Managing and reviewing submissions

• Reviewing submissions: How do I decide who to accept/reject?
• Paying participants
• Exporting Prolific data
• Awarding stars
• Automatic approvals
• Partial payments

Messaging

• Sending messages to participants
• Can I resend notifications about my study to participants?

Dealing with issues

• Account On Hold
• Problems with the completion URL (NOCODE submissions)
• Missing data from Prolific participant
• Participants who don't match the prescreening selected
• Asking a participant to repeat their submission
• How to Resolve an Underpaying Study with Bonus Payments
• See all 8 articles

Advanced study features

How to support more complex study designs

Blocking unwanted participants

• How to prevent certain participants from accessing your study
• Preventing participants from taking your study multiple times

Longitudinal Studies

• Longitudinal/Multi-part studies
• Minimising dropout / attrition rate in longitudinal studies
• Delaying payments for a long longitudinal study
• Can I collect participants emails to contact them later?

Complex study design

• Time Sensitive Studies
• Inviting specific participants to your study using a Whitelist
• Random assignment
• Dyadic experiments
• Bonus payments

Representative samples

• Representative Samples FAQ
• Representative Samples on Prolific
• Demographic balancing, e.g. ensuring 50% males and 50% females

Custom screening requirements

• Recruiting a niche sample with complex screening requirements

Pricing & Billing

Articles about managing your account balance in Prolific

Calculating costs

• What is your pricing?
• Researcher Referrals
• Different currencies (e.g., US Dollars)

Invoicing, Payments & Receipts

• Summer Flash Sale
• Billing: Invoices & Receipts
• Topping up your account via debit/credit card
• Topping up your account via bank transfer
• Total and Available Balance
• Refunds
• See all 7 articles

About Prolific's platform

An overview of Prolific, and Prolific's participants.

General FAQs

• FAQs for Startups
• Prolific Practices and Security Systems
• Citing Prolific

Data Quality

• Using attention checks as a measure of data quality
• Is online crowdsourcing a legitimate alternative to lab-based research?
• How does Prolific prevent duplicate participant accounts?

Privacy & GDPR

• Data Protection and Privacy

Compare Prolific with competitors

• How is Prolific different from MTurk & Co?

Demographics & screeners

• How does Prolific recruit participants?
• Who are the people in your participant pool?
• Can users have both a researcher and participant account?

Prolific's Best Practice Guide

Our guide on how to do great research online (and offline!)

Phase 1: Questions to ask before creating a study

• What research question do I want to answer? And why?
• Am I doing exploratory or confirmatory research? Why does it matter?
• What is my target population?
• What type of data do I need? Quantitative or Qualitative?
• How large should my sample be?
• Preregistering your Research

Phase 2: Things to keep in mind when designing a study

• How to phrase questions and items
• Special focus: Sensitive questions
• The order of your questions
• Tips for the visual design of your survey
• Failed attention checks
• Biases in research
• See all 11 articles

Phase 3: Piloting and launching your study

• “What’s that noise?” — Of systematic and random errors, or: Why pilot testing is important
• When to pilot test your study
• Approving Submissions and Rejecting Participants

Phase 4: Analysing your data

• Two common statistical frameworks: Null Hypothesis Significance Testing and Bayesian Statistics
• Pro-Tip: Point and Range Estimations – or: How to make your theory more interesting and useful

Phase 5: Iterating the research cycle

• Aim for converging evidence & theory building

Phase ∞: Metascience & the empirical cycle

• Researcher degrees of freedom
• A manifesto for reproducible science (by Munafò et al., 2017)

Statistical and Methodological Concepts

• What kind of sampling methods are there?
• What are the advantages and limitations of an online sample?
• Statistical Power