How It Works

This page introduces the Research Defender product suite and how each product protects survey data quality.

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1. What is Research Defender?

Research Defender protects survey data quality by identifying fraudulent, duplicate, and low-effort respondents before and during a survey. It combines digital fingerprinting, duplication detection, and open-end text analysis into a set of API products you call as respondents move through your survey flow.

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2. The Products

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3. How It Fits Your Survey Flow

1. At entry, call SEARCH (optionally with PREDUPE parameters) to fingerprint the respondent, detect duplicates, and check for fraud signals before they enter the survey.
2. Check participation with ACTIVITY to flag respondents with abnormally high survey participation across the ecosystem.
3. During the survey, use REVIEW to analyze open-ended responses for copy/paste, profanity, low engagement, and LLM-generated text.
4. Apply your term logic based on the scores returned. Research Defender publishes recommended term logic for each product.

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4. Protecting Your Integration

Nefarious respondents may attempt API suppression or link manipulation to bypass security checks. SEARCH offers three secured integration options to protect against this:

• Server-to-server — the browser gets a token from GETTOKEN, and your server calls the SEARCH API with it, so scores and flags never reach the respondent.
• Encrypted — integrated client-side, but the results come back encrypted and are decrypted on your server.
• URL validation — integrated client-side, with a validation value signed by your private key so SEARCH rejects any URL changed on the fly.

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5. Next Steps