What over 1,000,000 participants tell us about online research protocols

Abstract

With the ever-increasing adoption of tools for online research, for the first time we have visibility on macro-level trends in research that were previously unattainable. However, until now this data has been siloed within company databases and unavailable to researchers. Between them, the online study creation and hosting tool Gorilla Experiment Builder and the recruitment platform Prolific hold metadata gleaned from millions of participants and over half a million studies. We analyzed a subset of this data (over 1 million participants and half a million studies) to reveal critical information about the current state of the online research landscape that researchers can use to inform their own study planning and execution. We analyzed this data to discover basic benchmarking statistics about online research that all researchers conducting their work online may be interested to know. In doing so, we identified insights related to: the typical study length, average completion rates within studies, the most frequent sample sizes, the most popular participant filters, and gross participant activity levels. We present this data in the hope that it can be used to inform research choices going forward and provide a snapshot of the current state of online research.