Accepted for/Published in: Interactive Journal of Medical Research
Date Submitted: May 15, 2024
Date Accepted: Sep 24, 2024
Warning: This is an author submission that is not peer-reviewed or edited. Preprints - unless they show as "accepted" - should not be relied on to guide clinical practice or health-related behavior and should not be reported in news media as established information.
Effective recruitment or bot attack? The challenge of online research surveys and recommendations to reduce risk and improve robustness: a case study commentary
ABSTRACT
Online research has exploded in popularity in recent years, enabling researchers to offer both investigations and interventions to broader participant populations than ever before. However, challenges associated with online research have also increased – notably difficulties verifying participant data and deliberate data manipulation by bot and spam responses. To encourage researchers to reflect on the impact of bot attacks on research and how to manage this.* This article presents two case studies where online research was affected by bot and spam attacks, targeting the offer of compensation for research participants and recommendations based on these experiences are made. Screening and verification processes utilised are presented. Based on our experience, security and screening within online research platforms are partly effective, but no solution is available to protect researchers completely against bot attacks Implications for future research and advice for health researchers are discussed.
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Copyright
© The authors. All rights reserved. This is a privileged document currently under peer-review/community review (or an accepted/rejected manuscript). Authors have provided JMIR Publications with an exclusive license to publish this preprint on it's website for review and ahead-of-print citation purposes only. While the final peer-reviewed paper may be licensed under a cc-by license on publication, at this stage authors and publisher expressively prohibit redistribution of this draft paper other than for review purposes.