Don’t Let Your Research Questions Go Out Without PICOTS

Doing Research / Grants & Funding

All the best aims are wearing PICOTS (pronounced “peacoats”). Specification of your PICOTS* is the minimum outerwear required to prevent your research question from being caught in a downpour of questions. Having these details tucked in gets you ready to have a meaningful conversation with colleagues, evaluate feasibility, brainstorm about how to get the best study done, and prepare to share your concept:

P = Population

I (E) = Intervention (Exposure)

C = Comparator

O = Outcome

T = Timing

S = Setting

Use PICOTS as a checklist for operationalizing research questions and probing how the research would shape up under different assumptions. Ask:

Population: 

  • What group of participants is ideal?
  • Whom does this imply we need to include or exclude?
  • How would we operationalize those criteria?
  • What influence will that have on ability to identify participants/recruit well?
  • Do we need to worry about proof of concept or generalizability more at this stage?

Intervention:

  • What will participants do/experience in the study that is being tested for its effects?
  • What dose, frequency, intensity will be tested?
  • Do we need to invoke a specific behavioral or causal model?

Or Exposure:

  • What is the behavior, biomarker, experience, metric for which we are interested in evaluating the effect?
  • How will it be measured?
  • How will we ensure quality of the measure?

Comparator:

  • What comparison provides the most relevant contrast (e.g. usual care, no intervention, placebo, etc)?
  • What analytic approach will best support the comparison?
  • Does this comparator help test our causal model or could it be stronger and more direct?

Outcome:

  • What is our measurable outcome?
  • How will measurement be operationalized?
  • Do we need primary and secondary outcomes?
  • Can we achieve adequate power to assess the outcome?
  • If there is loss to follow-up, do we have alternative ways of assessing outcomes?

Timing:

  • Over what time frame will participants be recruited?
  • What is the time period over which intervention will be conducted for an individual participant?
  • How long after completion of intervention will measures be collected?
  • When will outcomes measured? How wide is the tolerable window for measurement?

Setting:

  • Where will the research be conducted or participants be recruited (e.g. academic tertiary care center, network of health department clinics, community-based, etc.)?
  • What are the characteristics of that setting?
  • If extant data, what was the setting in which the data was developed?

Try it, you’ll like it. And it’s better than the alternative of getting soaked later by questions and requests for details needed to clarify your concept for the research.

Taking PICOTS for a Spin

For example, if you’re interested in asking: “Do community-based lifestyle interventions really work?” or “What determines who stays in community-based lifestyle interventions?” work the PICOTS:

Initial Question: “Do community-based lifestyle interventions really work?”

Goal: Pilot intervention study with a primary aim of determining if an intervention results in weight loss

In this case a pilot would be a typical approach for estimating the effect size, feasibility, participant satisfaction, loss to follow-up, and need for adjustments to inform design of a future definitive randomized trial. So we sketch a picture of what the study could look like:

P: Adult women with physician’s permission who are registered for the first session of the 12-week New Beginnings Program, and who speak English or Spanish.

I: Structured small group (n=5 to 8) coaching program with 1) specific weekly goal setting targets (eliminating sodas, understanding metabolic effects of exercise and tracking, counting carbohydrates, planning daily physical activity, enhancing sleep, writing an individual vision for one’s health, making a long term health contract with oneself, etc.) 2) three small group resistance and circuit training coached sessions each week, 3) social media peer connections, and 4) individualized exercise, diet and stress-reduction prescriptions.

C: Women who have applied for the program and are eligible but who are currently on the wait list with an anticipated wait time of 14 or more weeks.

O: Primary outcome will be weight loss, measured as difference between first measurement (in pounds to one decimal place on scale provided and calibrated by the study) at intake session and weight at the last group session. Outcomes will be grouped by completion status where completers attended ≥75% of schedule sessions and non-completers fewer sessions. Weight loss will also be described by group for each of the 12 weeks. For secular trend among those with an intention to lose weight the wait list comparison (secondary analysis) group weight will be collected from initial application (or as documented in physician’s permission letter in application) and weight at intake session, adjusted for elapsed time between application and start of program.

T: The intervention will last for 12 weeks of structured lifestyle and exercise coaching. Informal peer and social media networks established during the intervention will continue unsupervised after completion. Secondary outcome data will be collected at 3, 6, and 12 months after completion of the intervention.

S: Privately owned gym facility partnered with non-profit (501C3) to provide a comprehensive lifestyle intervention program to means-tested low income women, the majority of whom are age 40 and older, African American and weigh, on average, more than 200 pounds.

Initial Question: “What determines who stays in community-based lifestyle interventions?”

Goal: Observational study of whether baseline mental and physical health status, locus of control, and dispositional optimism are associated with completion of a community-based lifestyle intervention

P: Adult women with physician’s permission who are registered the 12-week New Beginnings Program which is a structured small group (n=5 to 8) coaching program with 1) specific weekly goal setting targets (eliminating sodas, understanding metabolic effects of exercise and tracking, counting carbohydrates, planning daily physical activity, enhancing sleep, writing an individual vision for one’s health, making a long term health contract with oneself, etc.) 2) three small group resistance and circuit training coached sessions each week, 3) social media peer connections, and 4) individualized exercise, diet and stress-reduction prescriptions.

E: Lower levels^ of physical and mental health as assessed by Short Form 36, lower self-efficacy (assessed by Generalized Self-efficacy Sale), and greater pessimism (assessed by the Revised Life Orientation Test) at baseline.

C: Higher levels^ of physical and mental health as assessed by Short Form 36, internal locus of control, and greater optimism at baseline incorporated into logistic regression models to assess association of characteristics with outcome.

^ Cut offs to be determined by distribution of traits in context of national normative reference data.

O: Program completers will be classified as those who attended ≥ 75% of scheduled sessions and non-completers fewer sessions. Will also capture week of attendance for secondary analysis in time-to-event analysis.

T: The assessment will be completed within 12 weeks.

S: Privately owned gym facility partnered with non-profit (501C3) to provide a comprehensive lifestyle intervention program to means-tested low income women, the majority of whom are age 40 and older, African American and weigh, on average, more than 200 pounds.

But I can’t possibly know these details when I first think the thought!?

True, but you can get much closer than you think. Start by daydreaming and then add parameters that are initially fantasy. The approach to shaping questions jumpstarts thinking that then leads to:

  • Productive generation and sifting of research ideas.
  • Greater focus for literature review.
  • Strategic thinking about multiple aspects of feasibility .
  • Weighing the best choices for measures of exposure, covariates, and outcomes.
  • Enhanced ability to rapidly gather input from others.

Related Posts:

Acing Your Observational Research Aims

All research proposals – grants, dissertations, internal funding – must ace the description of aims.  Many scientific questions are interesting.  Not all are useful.  You must persuade your readers that the proposed aims/hypotheses to be tested and the related analysis will fill gaps in scientific knowledge.

Don’t Crash on Approach

Getting the approach – the methods section of your grant –  fine-tuned is literally the heart of it all. You must land your science smoothly. Study section members know, and recent evidence confirms, your grant’s score is not an equal weighting of component scores. NIH criterion scores are for significance, innovation, approach, investigators, and environment.

* Gordon Guyatt initially described PICOTS in Guyatt G, Drummond R, Meade M, Cook D. The Evidence Based-Medicine Working Group Users’ Guides to the Medical Literature. 2nd edition. McGraw Hill; Chicago: 2008. Subsequently the framework became standard for formulating inclusion and exclusion criteria for conduct of systematic evidence reviews and meta-analyses of interventions.

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Publishing Null Results

Doing Research / Writing & Publishing

Nearly every scientist has felt the frustration of pouring effort, money and (sometimes) tears into a project only to get null results. The elusive p<0.05 decides whether results get published or not—the oft-mentioned file drawer problem. Others have explained better than I can why this is a problem. Rather, I’d like to contribute some tips I’ve picked up on how to publish null results.

  • Combine results with a significant result. If the story of the paper allows it, consider adding the null results to another related analysis and publishing one big paper. I’ve had some success with this myself, where I decided to include three analyses of biomarkers that were non-significant with one that was.
  • Consider different journals. There is a bias to not even review null results. So consider other options such as open access journals or lower tier journals. The science still gets out there and a publication is better than no publication. Some journals specifically focus on null results such as PLOS One’s Missing Pieces and the Journal in Support of the Null Hypothesis. While I personally haven’t tried any journals focusing on null results, I have had some success looking beyond the top tier journals in my field and even considering journals in other fields.
  • Don’t give up easily, but know when to fold. One part of publishing null results is getting used to rejection, particularly not even having papers reviewed. If you know your methods are solid and your science strong, don’t give up. Human beings are prone to bias and this likely includes a bias against wanting to publish null results (particularly if it counters a favored hypothesis or theory). Be mindful, though, of how much time you have to spend reformatting for different journals compared to the time you need to spend on other responsibilities. There is no shame in giving up once you’ve made a good effort.
  • When designing your study or analysis, try to design it in such a way that even null results are interesting. This, obviously, won’t help after you’ve analyzed your data but you can still consider why the null results would be useful.
  • Add power analyses. I’ve tried this myself and it does seem to help. Showing that your study was powered to find a typical effect size for your field helps establish that the result wasn’t just because the study was too small or had too much error.

These strategies don’t negate the root cause of the file drawer problem, namely a publication system that wants flashy, highly citable papers, and null results just aren’t that. I don’t have any good suggestions for how to solve the systemic parts of the problem except what others have already said: more journals that specifically publish null results or having current journals commit to publishing more null results or abandoning p-values altogether. Hopefully these tips will help other new scientists until the field addresses the problem.

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How to Protect Your Protected Time

Doing Research / Faculty Life / Productivity

You’ve just gotten your K award—awesome!  75% of your professional effort is now protected to focus on your research and career development.  But wait.  What about that class you teach, or those days your department expects you to be in clinic, or the students whose dissertation committee you’re on, or…

Keeping 75% of your time protected can quickly get complicated.  Compliance experts Tesha Garcia-Taylor, MBA, and Robert Dow, MBA, recently presented to a group of Vanderbilt career development awardees their top tips for keeping on the straight and narrow.

First, consider the pie.  Pizza, if you like.  The pie is all of the effort you give to your work in an average year, across research, clinical, teaching, and any other activities you probably wouldn’t do unless your institution was paying you.  It includes everything from being in the OR to reading cell cultures to preparing a class syllabus to checking your work email.  Of this entire pie, 75% (six slices of your standard eight-slice pizza) should be a.) your research, or b.) your career development, which can include writing grants, presenting your work at meetings, and other things that might not be specifically sitting at a bench/interviewing research subjects/analyzing data that we’ll get to in a moment.

“But I’m in clinic 15 hours a week.  Isn’t that more than 25% of a week?”  Well, what’s a normal work-week for you?  More importantly, what’s a normative week for your profession?  Specifically, for your specialty—surgeons are more likely to work 80-hour weeks on a standard basis than PhD scientists, for example.  At Vanderbilt, a typical work-week for most, not all, of our faculty is right around 60 hours.  So 15 hours a week of clinic would actually be exactly 25% of a week in that scenario.  (This ignores the fact that you might also want/need to do things like go to grand rounds or complete compliance training, teach clinical trainees, etc., so best not to assume that 15 hours is all you’d be doing that isn’t research or career development.)

“Okay, but half the faculty in our tiny department just went on maternity leave, and I have to teach this and cover for that and all these other things.  I can’t just say nope, sorry.  What do I do?”

Option 1: Explode your workweek to 100 hours.  Fit in 25 hours of teaching/clinic/other and focus on your career development for 75.  We at Edge for Scholars (also anyone sane) do not recommend this option.

Option 2: Let the class/clinic/whatever take up 40% of your time this month or quarter, but devote 90% to your K work for the next month/quarter.  Effort should average out over the year, not the day or even the month.  That said, keeping effort balanced each quarter is preferable, because it’s easy to let things slide until there’s not enough time left in the year to get the right average.

Option 3: Say to your leadership, “I’m coming up on my annual progress report/I’m six months into my award/I’m [fill in appropriate time marker here], and I’m concerned that things aren’t squaring up with my effort on this K award.”  It’s not an urban legend that institutions around the country have had to give back money to the feds because they didn’t let a K awardee have his or her protected time.  Your department doesn’t want to give back grant money or be scrutinized by the compliance office or NIH, we promise.

However, the best time to discuss your effort with your boss is before you submit the grant proposal.  Mutually decide what activities you will put down if you get the award, and get that agreement in writing in the letter of institutional support.  When thinking about what you would drop to focus on your K award, consider a few things:

What can you really not miss?  If everyone in your department including Professor Multimillion Dollar Lab goes to the department seminar, you’re going to the seminar.  But that likely means you can miss journal club.  Go to the things that are most relevant to you, not to every event.

As well, what national things should you keep attending?  If you’re going to a meeting to network with potential collaborators and disseminate your research, of course keep going; this falls under your K effort.  But if, for example, the society for your specialty has an annual meeting that’s mostly attended by clinicians in private practice, you don’t necessarily need to be the one who takes the residents there to present.  Consider attending some meetings every other or every few years.

Does it overlap? Many activities that look like service may ultimately end up feeding into your research.  Say you need to learn how to read a particular kind of PET scan or a how to perform a new microscopy technique, so you visit a colleague and learn it from them.  In learning the new thing, you work on scans or samples from your colleague’s work that need to be read/analyzed.  Does this help them get through a number of scans or samples?  Sure, but it also helps you master these skills, so as far as the feds are concerned, that effort fits with your K.  Similarly, teaching a student who’s working on your research may pay dividends for them in the form of a degree, but it also helps your research get done.

Get to know your financial officers.  They want to help you understand and comply with regulations around effort.  If you don’t already receive a monthly budget and effort report, ask for regular updates to make sure they line up with reality.  This will become even more important as you move on to larger grants and run a bigger research team.

Protecting 75% of your time requires you to be proactive.  Check in regularly with yourself to make sure you’re spending the right amount of effort on your K work, and follow the advice above if things start looking unbalanced.

More Resources

Designing Your Career

Not that Kind of Grant Application: Tales of Career Development Awards 

More Things I Wish I’d Known Before I Wrote My K

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Not that Kind of Year: Tales of Year 1 as a New PI

Doing Research

It has been about a year since I started my new position as a principal investigator (PI) at Clinical Department in R1 University. It has been a challenge. Here are my suggestions on surviving the first year, based on areas where I succeed and failed. As always these days, n=me.

Find your people: The shock of loneliness in the first year is significant. You no longer have a built-in community of graduate students and postdocs with which to spend time. Your employees and your trainees cannot be your friends. You are their employer and/or mentor, and while this leaves abundant room for kindness, compassion, and well-wishes, the power differential is prohibitive for true friendship with your staff and trainees. The easiest way to deal with this loneliness is to find your community. Potential communities include other new PIs in your department, your institution, or your professional society. There are even peer-to-peer mentoring groups, like New PI Slack, which provide access to a community of new PIs who have gone, are going, or will go through similar trials and tribulations. However you decide to do it, make sure you find a community to support you and that you can support in turn.

Find balance with life: This has been a point of failure for me. I let the work take over this year. Do better than I did. Make sure you leave dedicated time for your hobbies, friends, and family. The administrative work will be there Monday morning too.

Find balance with collaborations: Find a balance in starting collaborations and be protective of your time. As a new PI you have a pot of unallocated money that you can invest in projects of interest. Established PIs know this as well, and you can find yourself paying for their pilot projects out of your start-up. As with all things, you need to carefully weigh whether this pilot study will translate into a grant or if it is a one-off experiment that will collect dust. You also do not want to work in a silo. It can be difficult to get that first senior author paper or grant, and by working with more seasoned investigators, you can build your publication record and grant support. My suggestion would be to find one or two PIs with whom you would be happy to collaborate and build those relationships. I have recently become very protective of my time and accepted that just because someone wants to work on my Terrible Disease of Interest, does not mean they have to work on it with me. I have instead cultivated two collaborations at my institution which have resulted in two grant submissions that were largely driven by my collaborators.

Find mentors: Even though you are a faculty member now, you still need mentors, and particularly mentors at your institution. While your mentors can provide scientific input, their roles are now focused on objectively evaluating your progress towards tenure. Some departments have this mentoring requirement formally established—others do not. Either way, establish a mentoring committee and make your semi-annual meetings a priority. It is much better to hear from your mentoring committee that you are not on track to achieve tenure versus hearing it from the Promotion and Tenure (P&T) committee after formal review. I meet with my committee every six months, and we discuss everything from funding to manuscripts to teaching and service.

Build good relationships with university officials: Get to know the people who make lab life possible. This includes individuals like the departmental administrator who reviews your grants before they are submitted to the Office of Research, individuals in the Finance Office, the Director of Facilities who provides building access and mediates installing big equipment, and the head of Procurement who signs off on big orders. In some departments, you might be able to delegate this to an administrative assistant or administrator. My approach has been to do it myself. It takes half the time and the next time I need something, like building access for an undergraduate student, I can take care of it quickly.

Write things down and get organized: This is the time to develop on-boarding documents for new hires, update lab protocols to reflect current equipment, generate lists of laboratory reagents (including how to order them), and develop lab policies (code of conduct, travel policy, etc.). Identify a way to have staff and trainees access and update documents through Google Drive or Box. Developing these resources and documents is quite a bit of work, but it lays the groundwork for the lab to grow and remain organized. One of the things that I did not do was develop written expectations for staff and trainees. This has resulted in some unpleasant back and forth with an undergrad about what my expectations were for them. It would have benefited us both to have a signed document for them to reference. Developing this document is currently on my priority list.

Practice saying no: You do not have to do all the things in your first year. Focus on getting the lab established and everything in place. Service on committees can surely wait until year 2 or 3. You do not have to work with everyone, you do not have to apply for every single grant mechanism available to you, and you surely do not have to agree to give every seminar or attend every conference in your field the first year. My department and institution have been reasonable in their expectations, but I did find myself saying yes to a lot of national conferences and seminars this year. While this is an excellent issue to have, my absence from the lab for such extended periods of time slowed research progress and impeded training. This, in turn, has delayed some of our grant submissions. Whether the national exposure versus manuscript/grant submission progress was a wise choice remains to be seen. On a personal note, all the travel did not contribute to work-life balance.

Celebrate the little things: We would all like to celebrate the big things, like papers in press or big grants awarded. While these are worthy goals for your first year, they can be difficult to achieve. Celebrate the little things, like the first experiment, the first figure for a paper, or the first lab poster. This has helped keep me motivated and lab members excited about progress while we work towards the big ticket items.

With these thoughts in mind, I go into the new year and into year 2. The upcoming year will be a busy one, with R01 submissions, dreams of two papers submitted, some teaching about Terrible Disease, and a couple new conferences to attend. Stay tuned for more tales!

Did I miss an important point? Do you have questions or concerns about the post? Or perhaps an anecdote to contribute! Feel free to send some electrons my way in the comments, via Twitter @PipetteProtag, or through traditional electronic mail pipette.protagonist@gmail.com

More Resources

Tune Your When, How Much, and What in Your Days

Not that Kind of Investment: Tales of Time Commitment

Staying Mentally Well in Academia is a Balancing Act

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Responding to Manuscript Reviews While Avoiding Cerebral Aneurysms

Doing Research / Grants & Funding

On first receiving a set of manuscript reviews, you might feel that your reviewers must be either hopelessly ignorant of the field, actively malevolent, purposefully obtuse, or all three. The thing you must remember, though, is that a request for revisions is as good as acceptance…but only if you’ll put aside your burning desire to see the wretches who did not appreciate your brilliance crushed for their impertinence.

Give it a few days, and then try the following techniques to respond in a way the reviewers will appreciate, while avoiding a cerebral aneurysm:

  • Form a mental image of the reviewer as a close colleague, who is sitting down over a cup of coffee or a beer with you to discuss your paper. His/her comments are thus all meant in the best possible way. Their goal is to improve your science, not destroy it. Respond in kind – the tone of your responses should be friendly and collegial. Remember that these are the guys that get to decide if your paper is accepted or not.
  • Every comment by the reviewer should change something in the paper, but to the extent possible the changes should just be text. When a reviewer asks a question to which a definitive answer would require six months of experiments, the right way to respond is to just acknowledge their question in the discussion. Say, “That is a great question! We’ve added a discussion of that issue as follows:”. When a reviewer makes a comment that’s flat wrong, respond with “That’s a tricky issue, so we’ve clarified it as follows:” or, “We’ve tried to improve our description of that…”.
  • Try to use data you already have in the lab to answer calls for new experiments. You probably continued to do experiments after you sent in the paper, or you have data on the same topic that you didn’t feel was quite right for the manuscript.  At worst, do experiments on things you can pull out of the freezer. We always keep all of our mouse parts, blocks, cDNA, etc. until the paper is published. Do not do extensive new experiments – for instance, new animal experiments – unless the journal is very high impact. You have to decide for yourself where that line is. The trick here is to interpret the reviewers’ comments so that your new data answers the question. Sometimes this requires a very creative interpretation, but I have almost never had a reviewer object – they are just happy that I validated their concern by doing a new experiment.

Reviewers are human, and will usually be happy if you just validate their concerns. To paraphrase St. Augustine, they probably have not “made a covenant with the devil to darken the spirit and confine your manuscript in the bonds of Hell.”  Your reviewers genuinely want to improve the quality of the scientific discourse. Following the above rules allows you to respond to a request for major revisions without raising your blood pressure or expending a great deal of effort.

 

More Resources

Reviewers & Editors Share the Secret Sauce

One-Minute Writing Repairs

Vexing Issues for New PIs: Picking Corresponding Author, Potential Reviewers, Blacklisting and Other Angst

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Don’t Miss the Deal Breakers: Nine Questions for New Lab Staff Hires

Doing Research

Hooray! You’ve set up a lab. You have a scale and everything. Now the applicants are pounding down your door looking forward to helping you get the Nobel Prize. Before you hire the most enthusiastic person with the best grades, be sure you include some questions that could be deal breakers even for the candidates you think are fabulous.

1.     Tell me about your undergrad research project. This is a great open-ended question that helps you quickly determine their level of comfort with what they were doing and how deep they dug into understanding their prior work.

2.     What are your goals for the next five years? That great candidate you found may look great to medical or graduate schools as well. And there’s a solid population of folks who are eager to parlay a few years of lab experience into a foothold for post-graduate education. Many labs make this work extremely well, but others need a longer-term hire. Make sure you have someone who can stay on the same timeline as you.

3.     Tell me about your level of comfort with (human specimens, animals, working with radiation and/or toxins, collecting phone survey data etc.) anything that you may take for granted but is critical for the job. There are great resources for teaching folks the ins and outs of personal protection, data organization and other skills, but you’ll have a whole other problem if they are horrified at the very thought of working with people/mice/specimens.

4.     Which of these skills on your resume are you ready to do immediately with little supervision? If its hard to believe your luck in finding someone capable of performing GC/MS, laser scanning microscopy and electrophysiology in ontogenetically labeled cells, that may be because they have a different idea of “skills” listed on their resume than you do. Make sure they can do the techniques listed rather than just having seen them done. A few methodological questions go a long way to identifying pros from enthusiasts.

5.     Can you travel? While it may be obvious that attending national meetings and presenting your lab’s results is a key feature of the job, don’t forget to ask.

6.     Who can I ask about what it’s like to have you as a supervisor? Being savvy, you surely got letters of recommendation from your candidates bosses, but what is it like to work for this person? The kind of boss they are to undergrads and rotation students in your lab will greatly impact your ability recruit the best labbies and keep them happy.

7.     Why should we hire you? Do they think they are technically amazing, a phenomenal organizer or just can get things done well? Give them a chance to tell you any information that they believe that you need to know.

8.     What do you think would be your greatest attribute in working in a (high paced/detail oriented/large/small….pick your descriptor) lab?

Protip: Send them a copy of your latest article and your lab rules before they get there and ask them if they have any questions about your work or work environment.

 

Now give yourself a pat on the back and publish some cool stuff with your swell new hire.

Did we miss anything? Leave us a comment!!

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Doing Research

Play and Learn! CCTS Launches Kaizen-based Game to Teach Scientific Reproducibility

To help young investigators meet an impending NIH policy requiring formal training in scientific rigor and reproducibility, CCTS has launched a new web-based quiz game. Based on the Kaizen (Japanese for “continuous improvement”) platform developed by CCTS Informatics, this strategy has been successfully used to provide continuing education to medical, nursing, and dental students. The game offers a fun alternative for those who must master new competencies.

CCTS created the R2T (rigor, reproducibility, and transparency) game with institutional T and K trainees as well as individual K and F awardees in mind, but “everyone is eligible and encouraged to participate,” said CCTS Research Commons Executive Administrator Dr. Jennifer Croker.

Interested? Email Brian Wallace (jetytrip@uab.edu) with your first and last name, institution, and email address.

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The Recruitment Tool You Didn’t Know You Have

Doing Research

If you are based at one of these 165 US institutions and you’re looking to recruit volunteers for your research study, you need to check out ResearchMatch.org!  ResearchMatch offers a completely free way to find potential research participants from a growing pool that now includes over 140,000 individuals willing to be in research studies.

ResearchMatch has a simple goal – to bring together: (1) people who are willing to participate in research and (2) researchers who are looking for participants. It is a free and secure registry developed by major academic institutions across the country to help facilitate the completion of clinical trials and make a real difference for everyone’s health in the future.

The process is simple: Check if your institution is a participant, register with ResearchMatch, have proof of your IRB approval (both for your study and to use ResearchMatch as a recruitment tool), and describe whom you want to invite to participate in your research. Your request will be reviewed by your institutional liaison. If approved, you will enter your study’s criteria in the ResearchMatch Search Builder, which will yield a de-identified list of volunteers who match your criteria. Then you send out IRB-approved contact message to these potential matches through ResearchMatch. The secure ResearchMatch clearinghouse will route your message to each of these potential matches and they will have the option of replying “yes,” “no,” or no response. You may contact those who agree to be contacted.

Voila! Participants for protocols that range from intervention trials to survey research.

Map of Sites

ResearhMatch Main Page

Researcher FAQ

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