ARRIVE 2.0 and the British Journal of Pharmacology: Updated guidance for 2020

By Elliot Lilley, S. Stanford, D. Kendall, Stephen P. H. Alexander, G. Cirino, J. Docherty, Christopher H George, P. Insel, A. Izzo, Yong Ji and 6 more. British Journal of Pharmacology, 2020

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The BJP has been and remains an active advocate of the ARRIVE (Animal Research: Reporting of in vivo Experiments) guidelines (Kilkenny, Browne, Cuthill, Emerson, & Altman, 2010a) that were established by the National Centre for the Replacement, Refinement and Reduction of Animals in Research (NC3Rs) in 2010. The ARRIVE guidelines need no introduction and we will not rehearse the arguments in depth here, other than to restate that the lack of key in vivo experimental details has been identified as a major contributing factor to the poor reproducibility of pre-clinical research. This fact was the primary driver for establishment by the NC3Rs of the first version of the ARRIVE guidelines. ARRIVE provided a 20-point checklist, specifying all of the experimental details (procedures and fixed factors) that should be included in manuscripts for proper reporting of animal research. The guidelines were rapidly endorsed internationally by funding bodies, universities, learned societies and, importantly, Life Science journals. Currently there are 1,046 journals endorsing ARRIVE including BJP, which was one of the original six influential journals that published the guidelines in full in 2010 (Kilkenny, Browne, Cuthill, Emerson, & Altman, 2010b). However, ARRIVE has not had the effect that was originally hoped for, despite this widespread support and endorsement. In 2016 and in 2018 assessments of adherence of articles published in endorsing journals identified a lack of engagement. As an example, one systematic review of reports of studies investigating acute lung injury revealed that, of the items expected for ARRIVE compliance, only 45% of those advised for inclusion in the Methods, and only 29% of those for inclusion in the Results section, were present (Avey et al., 2016). Moreover, formal endorsement of the ARRIVE guidelines by journals did not necessarily improve compliance (Leung, Rousseau-Blass, Beauchamp, & Pang, 2018). Such disappointing reports of outcome triggered a reappraisal of the guidelines led by the NC3Rs who, in 2018, established a new, international Working Group to review and update the ARRIVE guidelines to generate ARRIVE 2.0 (Percie du Sert et al., 2018). As with the team of experts brought together to establish the first iteration of ARRIVE, the Editor in Chief of the BJP is a member of the new team that was assembled. As such, the BJP has been well-placed to influence the content, testing and final publication of both iterations of the guidelines. In 2015, the BJP published an editorial reporting findings from a survey of compliance with ARRIVE in articles published in 2014 in two issues of the journal (McGrath & Lilley, 2015). The results were not as had been hoped for, as was also evident from assessments elsewhere, and revealed scope for improving compliance in respect of both the design of the (animal) experiments and the description of experimental procedures. To help remedy this problem, a checklist was developed that provided an aide memoire of the details of the animals and research procedures that should be reported in manuscripts submitted to the journal. A further editorial focussed on experimental design and data analysis (Curtis et al., 2018) for all types of experimental data published in the journal, including those emanating from experiments with animals, was also published. A key issue with many of the studies reported in BJP prior to this related to inadequate experimental design and inappropriate statistical analysis. At the same time, the Instructions to Authors were revised, to include the new rubric, and the editorial scrutiny of these aspects of the peer review process was tightened up. As a further prompt, in 2016, authors were required to make a Declaration as part of the submission process, to confirm that their manuscript was ARRIVE compliant. In addition to these measures, two new ‘specialist’ editors were appointed: a Design & Analysis Advisor and a Consulting Editor in ARRIVE Guidelines and Animal Welfare. The brief of the latter was to monitor ARRIVE compliance in BJP publications and to assist Senior Editors with their appraisal of manuscripts. All these changes still remain in place with the addition of a Consulting Editor in Statistical Analysis to ensure that the research reports match BJP criteria and so qualify for publication.

Subfields: Public Health, Environmental and Occupational Health, Small Animals, Statistics and Probability

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