Crowdsourcing Methods in Addiction Science: Emerging Research and Best Practices

Crowdsourcing platforms such as Amazon Mechanical Turk, Prolific, and Qualtrics Panels have become a dominant form of sampling in recent years. Crowdsourcing enables researchers to effectively and efficiently sample research participants with greater geographic variability, access to hard-to-reach populations, and reduced costs. These methods have been increasingly used across varied areas of psychological science and essential for research during the COVID-19 pandemic due to their facilitation of remote research. Recent work documents methods for improving data quality, emerging crowdsourcing platforms, and how crowdsourcing data fit within broader research programs. Addiction scientists will benefit from the adoption of best practice guidelines in crowdsourcing as well as developing novel approaches, venues, and applications to advance the field. Public Health Significance The following set of articles in this special issue describes best practice methods and novel applications of crowdsourcing in addiction and psychological science. These articles advance the field and present practical guidelines and open-source resources for researchers using crowdsourcing in future work.