Survey of the Quality of Experimental Design, Statistical Analysis and Reporting of Research Using Animals

By C. Kilkenny, N. Parsons, E. Kadyszewski, M. Festing, Innes C. Cuthill, D. Fry, J. Hutton, Douglas G. Altman. PLoS ONE, 2009

785 citations recorded by the source corpus.

For scientific, ethical and economic reasons, experiments involving animals should be appropriately designed, correctly analysed and transparently reported. This increases the scientific validity of the results, and maximises the knowledge gained from each experiment. A minimum amount of relevant information must be included in scientific publications to ensure that the methods and results of a study can be reviewed, analysed and repeated. Omitting essential information can raise scientific and ethical concerns. We report the findings of a systematic survey of reporting, experimental design and statistical analysis in published biomedical research using laboratory animals. Medline and EMBASE were searched for studies reporting research on live rats, mice and non-human primates carried out in UK and US publicly funded research establishments. Detailed information was collected from 271 publications, about the objective or hypothesis of the study, the number, sex, age and/or weight of animals used, and experimental and statistical methods. Only 59% of the studies stated the hypothesis or objective of the study and the number and characteristics of the animals used. Appropriate and efficient experimental design is a critical component of high-quality science. Most of the papers surveyed did not use randomisation (87%) or blinding (86%), to reduce bias in animal selection and outcome assessment. Only 70% of the publications that used statistical methods described their methods and presented the results with a measure of error or variability. This survey has identified a number of issues that need to be addressed in order to improve experimental design and reporting in publications describing research using animals. Scientific publication is a powerful and important source of information; the authors of scientific publications therefore have a responsibility to describe their methods and results comprehensively, accurately and transparently, and peer reviewers and journal editors share the responsibility to ensure that published studies fulfil these criteria.

Subfields: Small Animals, Statistics and Probability

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/4c7aab8592ee86040a57c400d0a97e2fd0ff9ee7

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Citations in the corpus

Improving bioscience research reporting: The ARRIVE guidelines for reporting animal research (2010, neutral): “Our review found that 4% of the 271 journal articles assessed did not report the number of animals used anywhere in the methods or the results sections [5].”
Reporting animal research: Explanation and Elaboration for the ARRIVE guidelines 2019 (2019, background): “However, evidence shows that the majority of publications fail to include key information and there is significant scope to improve the reporting of studies involving animal research [1-4].”
Principles and standards for reporting animal experiments in The Journal of Physiology and Experimental Physiology (2015, background): “There is a view that the reporting of biomedical research has often been inadequate, which has led to a call for improvements (Kilkenny et al. 2009).”
The ARRIVE guidelines 2.0: updated guidelines for reporting animal research (2020, background): “…that scientific publications often lack key information and that there continues to be considerable scope for improvement (McCance, 1995, Hackam & Redelmeier, 2006, Kilkenny et al. 2009, Macleod et al. 2009, Rice et al. 2009, van der Worp et al. 2010, Glasziou et al. 2014, Macleod et al. 2015).”
SYRCLE’s risk of bias tool for animal studies (2014, background): “Bias due to inadequate randomization and lack of blinding Random allocation of animals to the experimental and control groups, firstly, is not yet standard practice in animal experiments [17].”
A call for transparent reporting to optimize the predictive value of preclinical research (2012, background): “addressed when reporting the results of animal experiments; and (3) a”
Guidelines for reporting experiments involving animals: the ARRIVE guidelines (2010, background): “It is worth commenting on some of the issues that were identified in a survey of published biological science research, carried out by the NC3Rs, and that subsequently helped to inform the guidelines (Kilkenny et al., 2009).”
The problem of pseudoreplication in neuroscientific studies: is it affecting your analysis? (2010, background): “This is not something that can be safely assumed, and a recent systematic survey identified a number of problems with the reporting, experimental design, and statistical analysis of studies using laboratory animals [20].”