User flow
The Prolific API allows you to build powerful and flexible research workflows, in addition to helping you create tailored user journeys that may involve interacting with third-party services. In this article, we'll go through a detailed overview of the core user types and a typical flow for researchers using our API to run and manage studies.
Users
Participants: Participants use the Prolific platform to perform tasks or surveys for the studies created by researchers. If you'd like to view more information on who the participants on prolific are, please take a look at our article: Who are the participants on Prolific?
Researchers: Researchers design and create their studies on Prolific to conduct their research or test their AI models. Researchers can use the Prolific UI or interact programmatically with our API to create, manage, and monitor their studies.
Developers & Administrators: These are specific operational roles on Prolific. While they can also be researchers, in most cases, they’ll be part of the team helping the researchers from an operational perspective. They may work with the API to streamline processes such as dynamic study creation, real-time analysis, or quota management.
Objects
- Study: A researcher creates studies. A study is related to a task or a set of tasks. Studies can be surveys, task annotation, or task reviews. You can create, update, and publish your Prolific studies via our API.
- Study Collections: A group of studies.
- Submissions: The completion of the tasks presented in a study, by a participant assigned to them. You can approve, return, and reject submissions programmatically via our API.
- Bonus: A monetary reward paid to participants for a study, set by the researcher when the study is completed. A common use-case for bonus payments is to reward high-performing submissions.
- Messages: Researchers can interact with participants via our messaging system. While we keep the participant's identity private and monitor interactions, the researcher can send and receive messages via the API.
- Organization: An organization is the upper level of an account. It helps with the administrating and grouping of workspaces, as well as the sharing of resources between workspaces.
- Workspaces: Workspaces are collaborative spaces where you can work together with your teammates to organize and conduct research.
- Surveys: Surveys, available via Prolific, enable the researcher to create quick pre-screening studies.
- Participants: People who take part in studies that researchers run on Prolific.
- Participant groups: Managed groups of selected participants that the researcher can use to launch studies.
- Hooks: Hooks enable researchers to be notified of certain events that happen in studies.
Researcher Workflow (Using the API)
Here’s a standard user journey for a researcher using the Prolific API to manage a study:
Step | Action | Endpoint | Method | Description |
|---|---|---|---|---|
1 |
|
| Retrieve a list of all your studies. | |
2 | Create a project (Optional) |
|
| Create a project to group related studies. |
3 |
|
| Create a draft study with key parameters and filters. | |
3 |
|
| Manage a single study. View, edit, or delete as needed. | |
4 | Included during study creation or in an update payload |
| *if updating a study to include filters | |
4 |
|
| Reuse saved filter logic across multiple studies. | |
5 |
|
| Make your study live and open to participants. | |
6–8 |
|
| Retrieve all participant submissions to your studies. | |
6-8 |
|
| Retrieve a specific submission from your study. | |
6–8 |
|
| Approve, reject, or return a participant’s submission. | |
10 | Download demographic data |
|
| Download demographic data for your study participants. |
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