Preparing an Institutional Review Board (IRB) application can be complex, and we know there’s a lot to consider when planning your research.

Whether you’re applying for ethics approval for the first time or need information about how Prolific works, we’re here to help. We’ve brought together answers to common questions about Prolific, participant recruitment, consent, privacy, payments, and data collection to help you complete your application.

Based in the UK? You may know IRB applications as Research Ethics Committee (REC) applications. For simplicity, we use “IRB” throughout this guide to refer to both.

Please note that this guide provides information about Prolific and how our platform works. Your institution’s ethics committee or IRB is responsible for determining what information you need to include in your application and whether your proposed research meets its requirements.

Prolific is an online research platform that helps researchers recruit and manage participants for academic and commercial research.

You can design your survey or experiment using an external tool, such as Qualtrics, Gorilla, or a custom-built application, and then connect your study to Prolific. You can use more than 300 free participant filters to recruit people who meet your research criteria.

Once you’ve collected and reviewed participants’ submissions, you can approve and pay participants through Prolific.

Prolific has its headquarters in London, UK, and offices in both the UK and the US. Our registered address is:

Prolific Academic Ltd.

483 Green Lanes

London

England, N13 4BS

You can find our company information, registered address, VAT number, and relevant policies on our policies and company information page.

Participants primarily discover Prolific through word-of-mouth and social media. Researchers can also invite their own participants to the platform using our Bring Your Own Participants tool.

When Prolific was founded in 2014, participants were also recruited through campus flyers and a referral scheme. The referral scheme ended in March 2019.

We present Prolific as a platform where people can earn money by contributing to research that aims to make a positive impact.

You can learn more about how we introduce the platform and set expectations for participants on our Become a participant webpage.

We use a third-party tool to verify participants’ identities and help ensure that each participant is a real, unique individual.

We also use more than 110 checks to monitor response quality and help detect the use of large language models (LLMs).

You can find more information about our approach to participant verification and data quality.

Published research has found that Prolific can deliver high-quality data compared with other online participant recruitment platforms. The quality of your data will also depend on your study design, recruitment criteria, and data-quality procedures.

The following studies may be useful to include in your application or supporting documentation:

These publications can provide useful background for your application. We recommend reviewing the studies directly to determine which findings are relevant to your research.

Researchers identify participants using their unique Prolific ID rather than their names or other direct identifiers.

Study responses and the limited demographic, screening, and performance information made available to researchers are pseudonymised. This means the information is associated with a Prolific ID rather than directly identifying information, such as a participant’s name or address.

Communications between researchers and participants through Prolific are also associated with participants’ Prolific IDs.

Important: Pseudonymised data is not necessarily anonymous data in the legal or regulatory sense. Whether your research data is considered anonymous or personal data depends on the information collected and whether individuals can be identified or re-identified. Learn more here.

Prolific takes participant privacy seriously. Researchers must not ask participants to disclose information that could directly identify them, such as their names, home addresses, or social media accounts.

Before designing your study, review our guidance on information you cannot ask participants to provide.

If your research requires directly identifying participants, consider whether your study design can be adapted to meet Prolific’s requirements.

Participants must be paid monetary rewards through the Prolific platform. Payments through vouchers, points, or other non-monetary rewards are not permitted.

We believe fair compensation supports a positive participant experience and high-quality research data.

Researchers choose how much to pay participants, subject to Prolific’s minimum payment requirements:

You can find further details in our participant payment principles.

When preparing your IRB application, make sure your proposed compensation is clearly described and consistent with both your institution’s guidelines and Prolific’s payment requirements.

When setting up your study, Prolific provides a completion code that participants submit when they finish your research.

Once a participant submits the completion code, their submission appears in Prolific for you to review. When you approve their submission, payment is made automatically through the platform.

You can find more information in our participant payment guidance.

Participants must be at least 18 years old to register for Prolific and take part in studies.

If your research involves specific age requirements, you can use the available participant filters to recruit an eligible sample.

When participants join Prolific, they answer a range of questions about themselves. These questions help build their participant profiles, allowing researchers to recruit people who meet their study requirements.

Participants are not told whether a particular question will be relevant to a future study.

When you apply demographic or other eligibility filters to your study, Prolific makes the study available to participants who match your selected criteria.

You can use our Audience Checker to estimate the number of active participants who match your recruitment criteria.

As you add filters, the tool shows the estimated number of active participants in your target demographic. We define active participants as people who have taken part in a study within the previous three months.

This can help you assess the feasibility of your recruitment plan before submitting your ethics application. However, the estimate is not a guarantee that all eligible participants will take part in your study.

Yes. Prolific takes the protection of participant data seriously.

For further information, consult our guidance on data collection and participant security and our Participant Privacy Notice.

We recommend reviewing these resources when describing data protection and participant privacy in your application.

Yes. Participation in a study is voluntary. Participants see the study on Prolific and decide whether they want to take part.

Before deciding, they can view key information about the study, including:

You should also provide appropriate participant information and obtain informed consent within your study, in line with your institution’s ethical requirements.

You can include a consent question at the beginning of your survey or experiment. For example, participants can be asked to select “I consent” before proceeding.

Your consent process should follow your institution’s guidelines and explain the information participants need to make an informed decision. Depending on your research, this may include the study’s purpose, what participation involves, potential risks, how data will be used, and how participants can withdraw.

If a participant declines consent, redirect them to a separate end-of-study page with a message such as:

As you have indicated that you do not consent to participate in this study, please return your submission on Prolific by selecting the “Stop without completing” button.

This allows the participant to return their submission and makes their place available to another participant.

For more information, see our guidance on obtaining participant consent.

When you run a study using an external survey or experiment tool, Prolific can see the information entered into the Prolific platform, such as:

Prolific cannot see or store the responses participants submit directly to your external study tool.

Your research data is therefore collected and managed through the external tool you use, rather than being stored by Prolific.

Make sure your ethics application identifies the relevant survey or experiment tool and explains how research data will be collected, stored, accessed, and managed.

For studies conducted using an external survey or experiment tool, Prolific does not act as a data processor in relation to the participant responses collected through that external tool. As a result, a DPA is not required for that specific processing relationship. Learn more here about why we don’t need to put a DPA in place.

Exception: Prolific Survey Builder

If you use Prolific’s built-in Survey Builder, Prolific acts as your data processor in relation to the contents of participant submissions made through that tool.

The relevant DPA provisions are included in the Survey Builder Supplementary Terms, so they are incorporated into your agreement with Prolific when you use Survey Builder.

We want to make the ethics approval process as straightforward as possible for researchers.

If you think we’ve missed an important question or you need more context about how Prolific works, please let us know. Your feedback helps us improve this guide and support researchers throughout the application process.