Submissions guide

Approve, reject or return?

• Approve

Participants will receive the reward you have set immediately. Submissions that are awaiting review are automatically approved after 21 days. We recommend that researchers approve sooner than that. Some of our customers prefer or like to start with auto-approval first to keep the flow simple.

• Reject

Participants are penalised for rejections and if they receive too many they will be removed from the platform entirely. Please review all submissions holistically and remember that participants have spent time and effort taking your study. Please think carefully about whether the rejection is justified, and try to keep rejections to a minimum.

• Return

You can message participants to ask if they can return their submission and not get rewarded. This is useful if they for example have encountered a technical issue. Many would voluntarily do so to avoid rejection.

Related guide: Approval, rejections and returns

Does rejecting a participant automatically open a spot for a new participant?

If your study is ACTIVE (i.e. you haven’t received all the required submissions), then it will automatically open a spot for a new participant when you reject a submission.

If your study is in AWAITING REVIEW (i.e. you have received all required submissions), you need to change the status back to ACTIVE—use the START transition—to replace the rejected submissions.

Does a participant returning their submission automatically open a spot for a new participant?

If your study is ACTIVE (i.e. you haven’t received all the required submissions), then it will automatically open a spot for a new participant when a participant returns their submission.

If your study is in AWAITING REVIEW (i.e. you have received all required submissions), you need to change the status back to ACTIVE—use the START transition—to replace the returned submission.

What happens if a participant takes too much time to complete the study?

If a participant takes too much time, the submission will time out and they will lose their access to the study URL. A new participant will take their place instead. The max time allowed is dependent on the estimated time for the study. It is always less than 24 hours.

You can control the timeout of your experiment using maximum_allowed_time, but you can not set it lower than the default documented in the create study draft API.

I cannot see my study on my participant account. Why is that?

By default, studies are visible to all eligible participants based on our algorithm. Prolific’s algorithm prioritises participants based on how often they participate, acceptance rate and many more data points to provide a balanced participation opportunity between highly active and less active participants.

In order to bypass the algorithm, you would need to publish your study to the participants you want by using the allow list.

Check the testing guide on how to test your integration and create participant test accounts.

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"filters": [
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      {
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    "filter_id": "custom_allowlist",
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    "selected_values": [
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      "61f292141b0ec8b3b5ab353",
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      "61f2914e3bb4b4d40080aec"
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    ]
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  }
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]

How can I verify or validate the participant ids?

You can use the SESSION_ID URL parameter in the external study URL to get the submission details and confirm that it belongs to the participant.

Our ids follow a pattern of [a-f\d]{24} with only numbers and the letters a, b, c, d, e, and f with a length of 24.

How do auto-approvals work?

Submissions that are awaiting review are automatically approved after 21 days.