Online Survey Research in Dermatology: Are Your Participants Who You Think They Are?

Surveys are a commonly used research method in dermatology. The use of online surveys has increased over the last decade, as has the use of social media to recruit potential participants. There is a growing risk of fraudulent or bot responses to online surveys which threatens data integrity and wastes researcher time and funding. We report our experience of conducting an online survey investigating the experiences of adolescents and parents having teleconsultations for paediatric eczema. We experienced a rapid influx of responses within 24 hours, of which 95.7% appeared fraudulent. Indicators of fraudulent responses included duplicate free-text responses and clusters of surveys that were started and completed in tandem. Dermatological researchers should be aware of this issue and incorporate a plan to prevent, identify and manage fraudulent responses into the study protocol.