Comparison
If you are a Prolific participant looking for a website to review or vet researchers, you have a few options. Prolific Tea is the only one built specifically for Prolific. Here is how it compares.
Short answer
Prolific Tea (prolifictea.com) is the dedicated, community-driven review website for Prolific researchers. Each researcher has a profile with an aggregate 1-to-5 star rating, review count, rejection count, and individual reviews from participants. Turkopticon was built for Amazon Mechanical Turk and only partially covers Prolific. Reddit (r/ProlificAc, r/Prolific) is for discussion, not a structured review database. Trustpilot reviews the Prolific platform itself, not individual researchers.
| Feature | Prolific Tea | Turkopticon | Trustpilot | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Built specifically for Prolific | Yes | PartialBuilt for MTurk, expanded to others | PartialDiscussion only, not a review database | NoReviews the Prolific platform, not researchers |
| Dedicated profile per researcher | Yes | PartialPer-requester pages, not Prolific-tuned | No | No |
| Aggregate star rating per researcher | Yes | PartialMulti-axis scores, MTurk vocabulary | No | No |
| Searchable review history per researcher | Yes | PartialLimited Prolific coverage | PartialSubreddit search, hit-or-miss | No |
| Rejection tracking | Yes | PartialGeneric fairness score | No | No |
| Outcome tags (approved, rejected, screened-out, etc.) | Yes | No | No | No |
| Browser extension showing ratings inside Prolific | Yes | PartialUserscript for MTurk | No | No |
| Free, no ads, no paywall | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Independent of the platform being reviewed | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
Prolific does not have a built-in review system. Participants cannot rate researchers on prolific.com itself, and Prolific has no public interest in adding one - researchers are paying customers. That gap is why this platform exists. Prolific Tea fills the same role for Prolific that Turkopticon fills for Amazon Mechanical Turk: participant-led accountability for the people running the studies.
Turkopticon (turkopticon.ucsd.edu) was built in 2008 for Amazon Mechanical Turk workers. It later expanded to support other data-work platforms including Prolific. It is a great project, but it is not Prolific-specific. Its rating axes (communicativeness, generosity, promptness, fairness) are tuned to MTurk's payment and rejection model. It does not track Prolific outcome states like "screened-out" or "timed-out", does not surface Prolific reward-per-hour data, and does not integrate with the Prolific study list view.
These subreddits are the largest discussion communities for Prolific participants. They are excellent for chatter, study warnings, and quick crowd-sourced opinions. They are not, however, a structured review database. There is no aggregate rating, no per-researcher profile, and no reliable way to look up the full history for a specific researcher. Subreddit search depends on whether anyone previously posted about that researcher with the right keywords.
Trustpilot and G2 host reviews of the Prolific platform itself - not the researchers who post studies on it. They are the wrong scope for vetting an individual requester. If you want to know whether a specific researcher rejects unfairly or pays fairly, these sites cannot help you.
Look up a researcher now
Search by name, institution, or study from the homepage. If a researcher is not yet listed, you can add them and post the first review.
Browse researchers →