Running Studies & Recruitment
Once a study is validated and published, you collect data by creating a run and pointing participants at it — via a direct link or a recruitment platform.
Publishing a release, hosting runs, and recruiting all require a connection to the PsyCloud backend. Authoring and previewing work offline; everything on this page does not. See Launch for where this fits in the lifecycle.
Runs, sessions, and study links
- A release is an immutable, versioned snapshot of your study.
- A run is a deployment of a release that participants join.
- A session is one participant's data for a run.
- A study link (RunLink) is a shareable entry code that points at a run — the participant URL
looks like
…/run/<code>.
You can create multiple links for one run (e.g. one per recruitment channel), cap sessions per link, set an expiry, and toggle a link active without pausing the whole run. PsyCloud records which link created each session.
Share a direct link
- Publish and create a run
In Launch, validate → publish a release → create a run.
- Copy the study link
Create a study link for the run and share the
…/run/<code>URL directly with participants. - Watch it fill
Sessions appear in Monitor as participants join.
Recruit via a platform
PsyCloud integrates with Prolific and MTurk. For both, it creates the external study/HIT pointing at your run URL, wires up the completion handshake, and surfaces status and a review queue in Studio Monitor. You can drive everything from Studio's Launch → Recruit panel, or from the CLI.
PsyCloud creates a draft Prolific study pointing at your run, publishes it to start recruiting, receives signed status webhooks, and redirects finishers to Prolific using the run's completion code. From the CLI:
psycloud run create --release <bundleHash> --name "Main" --mode production
psycloud recruit prolific create --run <runId> --places 200 --minutes 12 --reward 300 --title "Study"
psycloud recruit prolific publish --run <runId>
psycloud recruit prolific status --run <runId>
# Add places, or review submissions:
psycloud recruit prolific extend --run <runId> --add 50
psycloud recruit prolific submissions approve --run <runId> --submission <id>Connect your Prolific token via the workspace connector (or PROLIFIC_API_TOKEN when
self-hosting). See docs/guides/prolific-recruitment.md
for the full reference.
Quality control
Build attention checks and timing/accuracy thresholds into your design, and use Monitor to spot abandoned or flagged sessions as data arrives. Then verify coverage and export from Data.