Product Updates

What’s New: 5 exciting Prolific updates that will improve your research in 2024

Sabrina Nordlund
|July 18, 2024

Over the last few months, we’ve released a host of highly requested features and powerful product updates. From AI tool detection to more flexible participant management, we’ve been improving your Prolific experience to ensure you get the high data quality you need.

Check out these five fresh Prolific upgrades that make it quicker and easier to do your best research.

1. Speed up your studies with enhanced sampling

Two exciting updates give you more control over your study distribution:

  • Quota samples: Easily recruit participants across specific demographics by specifying the percentage of respondents you need from each group.
  • Global representative and political representative samples: Use UK or US census and political affiliation data to ensure your study is representative. This is currently available for free until the 31st of August!

Now, you can complete studies faster, get more accurate and representative responses, and be more confident in your results.

2. Annotate data faster with Taskflow

Taskflow makes managing large dataset annotation faster and easier. Whether you’re training AI models or undertaking academic research, Taskflow helps you break down large datasets into smaller, manageable tasks for multiple participants to annotate at the same time.

Key features include:

  • Batch processing: Break down vast datasets into smaller units, making them easier to annotate.
  • Customizable task distribution: Create unique URLs for each dataset segment and specify the exact number of annotators for each task.
  • Automatic reallocation: If a participant doesn’t complete a task, Taskflow automatically reallocates it to someone else, meaning you always get the necessary number of responses for each task.

Find out more about how to use Taskflow.

3. Build your ideal participant pool with Bring Your Own Participants

This was a highly sought-after feature for many of you! Earlier this year, we introduced Bring Your Own Participants to Prolific. This lets you combine your own participants, product users, or trusted experts with our pool of 200,000k+ verified participants for the perfect sample.

Streamline your research by bringing every participant you need into one place. Get started now with our guide.

4. Protocol screens all participants for LLM use

Every Prolific participant completes a rigorous onboarding process, including ID and attention checks. And now, they’re also screened for Large Language Model (LLM) use with Protocol, our dynamic data quality tool.

Protocol detects any unusual behavior and AI-like responses. It works for any LLM, including ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini. Participants are only added to our pool once they have passed all checks and are monitored using Protocol.

Learn more about how Protocol protects your data quality.

5. Easily automate your study submissions using our API

You can now use our API to mark studies as completed on behalf of participants. This means participants don’t need to add a completion code for a study to be marked as completed.

This makes completing studies a smoother experience for participants and data collection easier for you.

Find out how to automate your studies with our API.