ArticlePloS one2025
Earmarking donations to boost study participation? Evidence from a field experiment.
Article in PloS one, 2025. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Not yet cited in PubMed.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
0 citing papers in PubMed.
No citing paper in PubMed yet.
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
3 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Charitable donations are often the most suitable available way to incentivize study participation, yet their optimal design remains unclear. In a preregistered field experiment, we invited 6,711 psychology faculty at top-200 universities to complete a survey in exchange for a US $5 donation to test whether allowing prospective participants to earmark the donation for a specific purpose increases study participation. Contrary to preregistered hypotheses derived from previous literature, the results showed no significant increase in study participation rates when participants could earmark their donation compared to a random allocation of funds. These findings suggest that while earmarking has been shown to enhance overall donation rates, its effectiveness may not extend to incentivizing study participation.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.