When your survey collects every response you ordered, fielding stops and your Dashboard shows In Review. Hover over that text and you'll see the literal number of completes collected so far—400/400, for example. Nothing has gone wrong—In Review is the last step before your survey is finalized, and reaching it means your survey did what it was supposed to do.
Here's what happens during that step, roughly how long it takes, and what you can do while you wait.
In This Article
- What In Review Means
- How Long It Takes
- Why Your Survey Might Go Back to In Progress
- What You Can and Can't Do While You Wait
- How You'll Know It's Finished
- Which Surveys Go Through Review
- When to Get in Touch
What In Review Means
Your survey hit its target. In Review begins automatically the moment your survey collects the full number of completes you ordered. Fielding stops, and the survey moves into a final check before it's marked Complete.
During that check, aytm:
- runs an automated data-quality review across your responses, looking for patterns that are hard to catch by eye at scale—straight-lining, speeding, contradictory answers, low-effort or duplicated open ends, and duplicate respondents;
- removes responses that fail those checks and replaces them, so you end up with the number of usable completes you paid for rather than the number that merely finished;
- reconciles your final quotas and N before the survey is closed out.
Your survey stays in the Surveys in Progress tab of your Dashboard throughout—it doesn't move to Completed until the review is finished.
Checking the details on your dashboard
For the full picture, click the gear icon next to your survey's fielding status. A panel opens confirming your survey has collected its requested completes, along with:
- Responses—completes collected against the number you ordered, shown as 50/50;
- Progress—the percentage of your ordered N collected so far;
- Survey ID—useful to have on hand if you contact the chat team about this survey.
The same panel keeps your survey actions within reach—Preview, Clone, Research Type, Move, Fielding Health, Stat report, and Survey notes.
💡 Tip: In Review is a good sign, not a warning. A survey that reaches it has already collected everything you ordered. Surveys that run into trouble show up differently—see Fielding Health for the at-risk and paused states.
How Long It Takes
In Review is a review step, not a timer. It ends when the quality check on your survey is finished and an aytm reviewer signs it off, so there's no countdown running in the background and no fixed number of hours to wait.
Two things make a particular survey take longer than usual:
- Responses had to be replaced. If the quality review removed responses, your survey has to collect replacements before it can close—and that means going back out to the panel to find people who match your targeting. See the next section.
- Quotas needed reconciling. Surveys with tight or interlocking quotas take more work to finalize than a single-cell general population study.
You don't need to do anything to move the survey along, and there's no action available on your side that speeds it up. If your survey has been In Review longer than you expected and you have a deadline, reach out to Customer Engagement through the chat—they can see exactly where your survey is in the queue.
Why Your Survey Might Go Back to In Progress
This one surprises people, so it's worth stating plainly: a survey in review can return to In Progress, and that's normal. It isn't an error, and it doesn't mean your survey re-launched or that you're being charged again.
Here's why it happens. When the quality review removes a response, that respondent's slot has to be refilled. Refilling means re-opening your survey to the panel to find someone new who matches your targeting—and while your survey is out collecting that replacement, it's genuinely back in progress, so the Dashboard says so.
Once the replacements land, the survey returns to In Review. On a survey where several rounds of replacement are needed, you may see it move back and forth more than once before it settles.
⚠️ Note: Because responses are actively being removed and replaced during this stage, your N will move in both directions until the survey reaches Complete. A number that's lower than your ordered total mid-review is expected, and it recovers. Compare against your ordered N, not against the number you saw an hour ago.
What You Can and Can't Do While You Wait
| Action | Available in review? |
|---|---|
| View your results and Stat Report | Yes. Your results page stays open throughout. Just remember the base is still moving, so treat mid-review numbers as provisional. |
| Review and reject open-ended responses | Yes—and this is the stage to do it. Responses you reject now are automatically replaced. Rejections made after the survey reaches Complete reduce your final N and can't be backfilled without help. |
| Rename the survey, move it to a folder, add notes | Yes. All of your usual Dashboard organization tools still work. |
| Stop or pause the survey | No. The Stop control is no longer available—fielding has already ended, so there's nothing left to stop. This is why the option disappears from the menu. |
| Edit the survey or add responses | No. Your questionnaire locks when you check out and launch the survey—not because it's in review. For any in-field revisions after launch, or to change your sample size, contact Customer Engagement. |
If you're planning to export or present the data, it's worth waiting until the survey reaches Complete. An export pulled mid-review reflects a base that's still changing.
How You'll Know It's Finished
When the review is done, two things happen:
- Your survey moves from Surveys in Progress to the Completed section of your Dashboard.
- If you launched the survey yourself, you'll receive an email with the subject "Your survey on aytm is delivered!". If an aytm team member launched it for you, your Customer Engagement contact reaches out once the survey is fully complete instead.
⚠️ Note: There's no email when your survey enters review—only when it finishes. If you're waiting on a survey, the Dashboard is the place to check. The email confirms the end of the stage, not the start of it.
Once your survey is Complete, the data is final and ready for reporting and export.
Which Surveys Go Through Review
In Review applies to panel surveys—studies where aytm sources your respondents. List Surveys, where you supply your own respondents, don't go through this stage and move straight from In Progress to Complete when fielding ends.
When to Get in Touch
Reach out to Customer Engagement through the chat bubble if:
- your survey has been In Review longer than you expected and you have a deadline;
- your N doesn't look right and the arithmetic doesn't add up;
- you want to reject more responses than your allowance covers, or the survey has already reached Complete and you need responses replaced;
- you need more completes than you originally ordered.
Every response removed during review is logged against your survey, so Customer Engagement can tell you exactly what was removed and when—you don't have to reconstruct it from the N.