You can pause and stop an active study at any time by selecting the option from the Action menu.
Pausing a study
The option to pause a study can be useful if you become aware of any problems with your study after it has been published which means you must temporarily stop data collection.
When you pause a study, this will prevent further participants from being able to reserve a place for that study on Prolific. This will not affect participants who are already in your external study, as we are not able to recall them from the external site. Furthermore, participants have up to 10 minutes to start the study after reserving their place. Consequently, some participants may still be able to join your external study as they reserved their place on Prolific before the study was paused.
We recommend thoroughly checking your study before publishing, to avoiding pausing the study unless necessary.
Once any issues are resolved and you're ready to resume data collection, you can do this by selecting 'start' on the action menu.
Automatic pausing
When a study has reached the desired number of submissions and these show as 'awaiting review', if you then either:
- reject one of those submissions
or
- a participant who was 'awaiting review' subsequently decides to return their submission
the study will become paused automatically and the number of submissions will reduce accordingly.
From the action menu, you can start the study again to fill the newly available place(s) or stop the study with less than the total number of submissions originally available.
Stopping a study
You may wish to close your study early before the maximum number of approved submissions has been reached.
This could be because you have reached a satisfactory number of responses or you could wish to change the study in some way, such as adjusting the prescreening criteria.
You can stop any active study from the action menu. The study will then move to an 'awaiting review' status, and will become completed once all submissions have been reviewed.
The study summary document which will show how much the study cost, and any unspent funds will be returned to your available balance.
If you want to resume data collection after stopping your study, you can duplicate it from the action menu and publish a new version.