Prolific Assistant. Make sure you never miss out on a Prolific study again.

As I've mentioned before, by far my favourite, "survey," site is Prolific, which pays you to take part in academic research studies, mostly of less than half an hour in length. The studies are usually interesting and, generally, have a healthy pay rate.

There is, however, one problem with Prolific, and that's that it hardly ever emails you to let you know there are studies available. On top of that, studies are often snapped up within minutes of appearing, meaning you can miss out on them completely.

To get round this problem, you can always have the site's Studies page permanently open, with Super Auto Refresh set to reload the page every minute or so. However, that isn't necessarily the most convenient of things and, if everyone does it, it's in danger of slowing the site down to a halt.

Fortunately, there is a better way. And that's to use Prolific Assistant, an extension to your browser, which alerts you whenever a Prolific study's available. At the moment, Prolific is testing a new Beta version of its site, which isn't yet, it seems, compatible with Prolific Assistant. However, the extension still works fine with the old version of the site and I'd assume the extension will be updated to work with the new version of the site before too long.

If you do use Prolific Assistant, make sure to have it set to listen for changes to Prolific at intervals of more than 60 seconds, so that it doesn't put too much strain on the site's servers, which could cause problems with page loading.

Prolific Assistant is highly recommended and you can get it by going to the Google Chrome Web Store. Rest assured that's not a referral link and I won't make any money from you using it.

This, however, is a referral link. Use it to sign up to Prolific and both you and I could make money from it.