A randomised controlled trial of an Intervention to Improve Compliance with the ARRIVE guidelines (IICARus)

Emily S Sena,Kaitlyn Hair,Malcolm R Macleod

doi:10.1186/s41073-019-0069-3

Abstract

BackgroundThe ARRIVE (Animal Research: Reporting of In Vivo Experiments) guidelines are widely endorsed but compliance is limited. We sought to determine whether journal-requested completion of an ARRIVE checklist improves full compliance with the guidelines.MethodsIn a randomised controlled trial, manuscripts reporting in vivo animal research submitted to PLOS ONE (March–June 2015) were randomly allocated to either requested completion of an ARRIVE checklist or current standard practice. Authors, academic editors, and peer reviewers were blinded to group allocation. Trained reviewers performed outcome adjudication in duplicate by assessing manuscripts against an operationalised version of the ARRIVE guidelines that consists 108 items. Our primary outcome was the between-group differences in the proportion of manuscripts meeting all ARRIVE guideline checklist subitems.ResultsWe randomised 1689 manuscripts (control: n = 844, intervention: n = 845), of which 1269 were sent for peer review and 762 (control: n = 340; intervention: n = 332) accepted for publication. No manuscript in either group achieved full compliance with the ARRIVE checklist. Details of animal husbandry (ARRIVE subitem 9b) was the only subitem to show improvements in reporting, with the proportion of compliant manuscripts rising from 52.1 to 74.1% (X2 = 34.0, df = 1, p = 2.1 × 10−7) in the control and intervention groups, respectively.ConclusionsThese results suggest that altering the editorial process to include requests for a completed ARRIVE checklist is not enough to improve compliance with the ARRIVE guidelines. Other approaches, such as more stringent editorial policies or a targeted approach on key quality items, may promote improvements in reporting.

Highlights

The ARRIVE (Animal Research: Reporting of In Vivo Experiments) guidelines are widely endorsed but compliance is limited
In an effort to improve reporting standards, an expert working group coordinated by the National Centre for the Replacement, Refinement and Reduction of Animals in Research (NC3Rs) developed the Animal Research: Reporting of In Vivo Experiments (ARRIVE) guidelines [9], published in 2010
Since the ARRIVE guidelines were first published, they have been endorsed by many journals in their instructions to authors, but this has not been accompanied by substantial improvements in reporting [2, 3, 6, 14]

Summary

Introduction

The ARRIVE (Animal Research: Reporting of In Vivo Experiments) guidelines are widely endorsed but compliance is limited. We sought to determine whether journal-requested completion of an ARRIVE checklist improves full compliance with the guidelines. There are widespread failures across in vivo animal research to adequately describe and report research methods, including critical measures to reduce the risk of experimental bias [10, 13]. Such omissions have been shown to be associated with overestimation of effect sizes [8, 13] and are likely to contribute, in part, to translational failure. Recent findings suggest that following the introduction of mandated completion of a distinct reporting checklist at ten Nature Journals at the stage of first revision significantly improved the quality in reporting versus that of comparator journals [7, 12]

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