What is a sponsored survey?
Advertisers can pay to run surveys on ResearchGate. A sponsored survey consists of a series of questions provided by its sponsor. Surveys help advertisers understand how well their brand is recognized by the researcher community, receive feedback about their products, or collect other insights. ResearchGate members and visitors may be invited to participate in sponsored surveys through ads on our platform.
Here’s an example of what an advertisement for a survey can look like:
Why isn’t the survey sponsor always identified?
In some cases, to make sure the survey sponsor can get unbiased answers to the questions being asked, their name will not be identified on the survey itself.
You can get a sense of the types of companies that advertise on ResearchGate here.
Who is responsible for the questions in a sponsored survey?
The sponsor of a survey is always responsible for its contents.
Will my responses be anonymous?
No personal data relating to your participation in a survey will be made available to the survey sponsor. Your survey responses will only be shared with the sponsor in an aggregated and anonymized way. This means that the advertiser will not know who participated or who submitted which responses.
In open-ended survey questions that allow you to respond by entering text, it's possible to identify yourself by your responses. If you'd like to remain anonymous, please don't enter personal data.
Will my participation affect my ResearchGate experience?
For tracking and statistics purposes, your participation and survey responses will be recorded by ResearchGate in a way that links them with your ResearchGate account. If you participate in a survey, we may show you ads from the survey sponsor in the future. However, neither your participation in a survey nor the responses that you submit will be displayed publicly on your ResearchGate profile.
For more information about ad targeting, please see our Privacy Policy.
Will I be compensated for participating in a survey?
Sponsored surveys generally won't offer an incentive or compensation for participating in or completing a survey.
In some cases, a survey sponsor will offer an incentive such as a gift card or ebook in exchange for completing a survey. If an incentive or compensation is offered, conditions apply.
General conditions include:
- To be eligible, you must be over the age of 18.
- One gift card per person.
Eligibility may also be based on factors such as age, location, and/or survey completion. Conditions can vary by survey or survey sponsor. Details about an individual survey's conditions can be found on the survey itself.
All gift cards and other incentives are granted at our full and final discretion.
Incentives may be fulfilled through our partner Tremendous.
For more information about our fulfillment partner, please see Tremendous, Inc's Privacy Policy.
Why can't I complete a survey?
Sponsored surveys may start with one or more 'screening' questions to see if a respondent is in the target group for the survey. After answering screening questions, a respondent may be disqualified from taking part in and completing the survey.
