Cohen Andrew J, Washington Sam, Butler Christi, Kamal Puneet, Patino German, Tresh Anas, Mena Jorge, Ndoye Medina, Breyer Benjamin N
Department of Urology, Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital and Trauma Center, University of California, San Francisco, 1001 Potrero Suite 3A, San Francisco, CA, 94110, USA.
Department of Biostatistics and Epidemiology, University of California-San Francisco, San Francisco, CA, USA.
BMC Res Notes. 2019 Feb 28;12(1):113. doi: 10.1186/s13104-019-4146-y.
Web-based platforms have revolutionized the ability for researchers to perform global survey research. Methods to incentivize participation have been singularly focused on European and North American participants with varied results. With an ever increasing proportion of biomedical research being performed in non-western countries, assessment of novel methods to improve global survey response is timely and necessary. To that end, we created a three-arm nested randomized control trial (RCT) within a prospective cohort study to assess the impact of incentives on survey responsiveness in a global audience of biomedical researchers.
Email invitations were sent to authors and editors involved in online publishing totaling 2426 participants from 111 countries. Overall we observed a 13.0% response rate: 13.3% for the control group, 14.4% for a group entered to win a gift card, and 11.1% for a group whose participation lead to donation to charity (p = 0.17). Year of publication nor country impacted response rate. Within subgroups, editors were significantly less likely to respond to the survey as compared to authors (6.5% vs. 18.9%; p-value < 0.01). With power to detect a 4.8% difference among groups, we could not detect an impact of incentives on global survey response.
基于网络的平台彻底改变了研究人员进行全球调查研究的能力。激励参与的方法一直只专注于欧洲和北美参与者，结果各异。随着越来越多的生物医学研究在非西方国家进行，评估提高全球调查回复率的新方法既及时又必要。为此，我们在一项前瞻性队列研究中开展了一项三臂嵌套随机对照试验（RCT），以评估激励措施对全球生物医学研究人员群体调查回复率的影响。
向参与在线出版的作者和编辑发送了电子邮件邀请，共有来自111个国家的2426名参与者。总体而言，我们观察到回复率为13.0%：对照组为13.3%，有机会赢取礼品卡的组为14.4%，参与可导致向慈善机构捐款的组为11.1%（p = 0.17）。出版年份和国家均未影响回复率。在亚组中，与作者相比，编辑回复调查的可能性显著更低（6.5%对18.9%；p值<0.01）。由于有能力检测出组间4.8%的差异，我们未检测到激励措施对全球调查回复的影响。
