A Researcher’s 4 Best Friends on ResearchMatch

Let the ResearchMatch filters and logic help you assemble your group of potential research study volunteers to contact!

Every study has its own set of inclusion and exclusion criteria. Help increase your odds of “finding the right match” by sending your IRB approved recruitment message to volunteers that are likely to meet your study’s criteria.

#1 The Geographic Filter — use this filter to hone in on a geographic location

If your participants must travel to you for study visits — use the Distance to Institution filter.

Use the state filter to choose one or more states that apply to your study’s inclusion criteria.

#2 The Demographic Filter

Start with the basics by choosing the age, gender, and race of your participants.

Need obese participants? Use the BMI filter. Are smokers an exclusion? Choose ‘no’ under smoking status.

Tip: If your study is only recruiting women, do not send the message to men — Volunteers get fatigued and withdraw from RM when they are contacted about studies they do not meet the basic criteria for. Losing volunteers is a loss for everyone!

#3 The Health Condition and Medication Filters

Like Google and Pinterest, ResearchMatch needs you to use the logic model operators ‘OR’, ‘AND’, and “Exclude”. To begin, click on Set 1, Set 2, or EXCLUDE, and let these powerful friends do the work for you! Watch out — this can be tricky! Read the directions located on the filter and follow along.

Set 1 uses OR (‘Show me people with high blood pressure OR diabetes’)

Set 2 uses AND (‘ Only show me people with high blood pressure AND diabetes’)

Exclude is your power helper (‘Exclude people from this group that report having cancer’)

#4 Add a REDCap eligibility survey

To further refine your potential volunteer pool, you can add an eligibility survey along with your IRB-approved recruitment contact message. Interested volunteers who say ‘yes’ to your contact message will then be re-directed to this REDCap eligibility survey. Their responses will be in your REDCap database, so be sure to ask for identifiers and remember to always have your survey IRB approved!

Questions? Log in and watch the YouTube videos on your RM dashboard.

Email us — we’re here to help! info@researchmatch.org.