Terminology

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.

Term	Definition
Study	A data collection unit containing tasks for participants. Can be surveys, annotations, evaluations, or any structured data collection.
Project	A group for related studies. Sits between workspace and study in the hierarchy. Useful for grouping experiments, waves, or campaigns.
Workspace	The top-level organizational unit controlling access and billing. Contains projects and studies. The hierarchy is defined as: Workspace > Project > Study.
Participant	An individual who completes studies on Prolific. Verified through multi-step authentication and ongoing quality checks.
Submission	A participant’s response to a study. It can be in various states including approved, returned, or rejected.
Reward	A monetary reward paid to participants for successfully completing a study.
Bonus	An additional monetary reward paid to the participant, often used for high-performing submissions.
Participant groups	Custom participant lists for targeting or exclusion. Useful for longitudinal studies and quality management.
Custom groups	Specialist participants curated by Prolific for expertise in specific domains (e.g., STEM, Healthcare, languages) or AI task types (e.g., fact-checking, image annotation, comparative reasoning, etc.). Studies can be launched specifically to all participants in a custom group.
Hooks	Webhooks for event notifications, such as changes in study status.
Filters or Pre-screeners	Criteria for participant targeting based on a wide range of criteria, including demographics and behaviour.
Custom screening / In-study screening	Questions to filter participants beyond available pre-screeners. Used when standard filters don’t meet participant targeting requirements.