Abstract
BACKGROUND: The goal of this article is to conduct an assessment of the peer-reviewed primary literature with study objectives to analyze Amazon.com 's Mechanical Turk (MTurk) as a research tool in a health services research and medical context. METHODS: Searches of Google Scholar and PubMed databases were conducted in February 2017. We screened article titles and abstracts to identify relevant articles that compare data from MTurk samples in a health and medical context to another sample, expert opinion, or other gold standard. Full-text manuscript reviews were conducted for the 35 articles that met the study criteria. RESULTS: The vast majority of the studies supported the use of MTurk for a variety of academic purposes. DISCUSSION: The literature overwhelmingly concludes that MTurk is an efficient, reliable, cost-effective tool for generating sample responses that are largely comparable to those collected via more conventional means. Caveats include survey responses may not be generalizable to the US population.