Uploaded August 2025 | Updated September 2026, 2 weeks ago
Dr Alexandra Lautarescu is a postdoctoral research associate in neuroimaging at King’s College London, originally trained in psychology. Her work often intersects data integrity and mental health research. Recently, she has explored the growing problem of bot infiltration in online surveys, developing practical methods to detect and exclude fraudulent responses without compromising genuine participants.
Alex explains how online surveys, especially those recruiting via social media, are vulnerable to bot attacks that can distort data integrity. She presents a mixed-methods approach for managing the issue.
Key Takeaways:
- Bot infiltration in online surveys is increasingly disruptive and hard to detect.
- There is no perfect automated fix, so prevention is better than cure.
- Multi-layered detection combining both quantitative and human verification works best.
- Transparent reporting of bot exclusion methods builds research credibility.
- Human judgment remains essential alongside automation.
Dr Alexandra Lautarescu is a postdoctoral research associate in neuroimaging at King’s College London, originally trained in psychology. Her work often intersects data integrity and mental health research. Recently, she has explored the growing problem of bot infiltration in online surveys, developing practical methods to detect and exclude fraudulent responses without compromising genuine participants.
Alex explains how online surveys, especially those recruiting via social media, are vulnerable to bot attacks that can distort data integrity. She presents a mixed-methods approach for managing the issue.
Key Takeaways:
- Bot infiltration in online surveys is increasingly disruptive and hard to detect.
- There is no perfect automated fix, so prevention is better than cure.
- Multi-layered detection combining both quantitative and human verification works best.
- Transparent reporting of bot exclusion methods builds research credibility.
- Human judgment remains essential alongside automation.
