A Researcher's Thoughts on Web-based Experiments

Joshua Hartshorne (Cognition and Language Lab):

When I first started doing Web-based experiments, a number of people in my own lab were skeptical as to whether I would get anything valuable out of them. Part of this was due to worries about method (How do you know the participants are paying attention? How do you know they are telling the truth?), but I think part of it was also a suspicion of the Internet in general, which, as we all know, is full of an awful lot of crap.

For this reason, I expected some difficulties getting my Web-based studies published. However, the first of these studies was accepted without much drama, and what concerns the reviewers did raise had nothing to do with the Web (granted that only one of the experiments in that paper was run online). Similarly, while the second study (run in collaboration with Tal Makovski) has run into some significant hurdles in getting published, none of them involved the fact that the experiments were all run online.

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