The new ARRIVE (Animals in Research: Reporting In Vivo Experiments) guidelines on reporting animal studies aim to promote high-quality, comprehensive reporting to allow an accurate critical review.
Due to growing concern about the poor and inconsistent quality of many peer-reviewed bioscience articles, the National Centre for the Replacement, Refinement and Reduction of Animals in Research (NC3Rs), a UK government-sponsored organization, initiated a series of discussions with researchers, statisticians, journal editors and representatives of funding organizations that culminated in the publication of new guidelines for publishing animal research.
Based on the CONSORT guidelines for reporting of randomized clinical trials, the ARRIVE guidelines set out a checklist that indicate the minimum requirement for reporting animal studies. The list of required information includes number, strain and sex of the animals used, the statistical methods used and the degree of variability in the data.
In their published guidelines, Kilkenny and colleagues (PLoS Biology | June 2010 | Volume 8 | Issue 6 | e10004122) emphasize the waste of resources associated with inadequate reporting of life science research and state that a wealth of evidence shows that across many areas, the reporting of biomedical research is often inadequate, leading to the view that even if the science is sound, in many cases the publications themselves are not fit for purpose,meaning that incomplete reporting of relevant information effectively renders many publications of limited value as instruments to inform policy or clinical and scientific practice.