Lab recruitment systems

ORSEE, hroot, eRecruit and similar systems organise a university subject pool: they hold the register of participants, send the invitations, and schedule sessions. Connecting one to Open Lab is mostly a matter of realising how little there is to connect.

What these systems do, and don't

ORSEE — long-established in experimental economics — along with hroot and eRecruit, invites people from your pool and records who took part. What none of them provides, as they come, is the thing Sona provides: a completion URL that your study calls at the end to credit somebody automatically. If your lab has extended its installation, check locally; nothing here stops you pointing a Redirect component at whatever endpoint that extension exposes.

Participation is confirmed on your side instead, from the session record or from your own data. So there is no step 4 to look for here, and looking for one is the main way people lose an afternoon.

Setup

Copy the Study link from Invitations → Public links and put it in the invitation your system sends:

https://app.open-lab.online/studies/ABCDE

That is genuinely the whole integration. Everything below is optional and depends on what you need to reconcile afterwards.

Matching a session to a person in your pool

Open Lab studies are anonymous by default, so if you need to know which pool member produced which session, pick one of these.

  • A per-participant link. If your system can substitute an identifier into the URL it mails out — the way Sona substitutes %SURVEY_CODE% — append it as a named parameter and it will be stored on the participant record: ?pool_id=THEIR_PLACEHOLDER. Check your own system's documentation for the placeholder syntax; it differs between systems and between versions.
  • A completion code. Switch on Generate completion code in the Study Builder and Show completion code on this page on the Ending page, then ask participants to report the code. The Participants export carries every code, so reconciling is a spreadsheet join.
  • Ask. For a lab session where you know who is at which machine, a question at the start of the study is often less trouble than either of the above.

Only collect an identifier you actually need

A pool ID pasted into a study link turns an anonymous dataset into a pseudonymous one, which changes what you have to say in your ethics application and your privacy notice. Worth a moment's thought before adding it out of habit.

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