Research on animals generally lacks transparent reporting of study design and implementation, as well as results. As a consequene of poor reporting, we are facing problems in replicating published findings, publication of underpowered studies and excessive false positives or false negatives, publication bias, and as a result difficulties in translating promising preclinical results into effective therapies for human disease. To improve the situation, in 2010 the ARRIVE guidelines for the reporting of animal research (www.nc3rs.org.uk/ARRIVEpdf) were formulated, which were adopted by over 300 scientifc journals, including the Journal of Cerebral Blood Flow and Metabolism (www.nature.com/jcbfm). Four years after, Baker et al. ( PLoS Biol 12(1): e1001756. doi:10.1371/journal.pbio.1001756) have systematically investigated the effect of the implementation of the ARRIVE guidelines on reporting of in vivo research, with a particular focus on the multiple sclerosis field. The results are highly disappointing:

‘86%–87% of experimental articles do not give any indication that the animals in the study were properly randomized, and 95% do not demonstrate that their study had a sample size sufficient to detect an effect of the treatment were there to be one. Moreover, they show that 13% of studies of rodents with experimental autoimmune encephalomyelitis (an animal model of multiple sclerosis) failed to report any statistical analyses at all, and 55% included inappropriate statistics.. And while you might expect that publications in ‘‘higher ranked’’ journals would have better reporting and a more rigorous methodology, Baker et al. reveal that higher ranked journals (with an impact factor greater than ten) are twice as likely to report either no or inappropriate statistics’ (Editorial by Eisen et al., PLoS Biol 12(1): e1001757. doi:10.1371/journal.pbio.1001757).

It is highly likely that other fields in biomedicine have a similar dismal record. Clearly, there is a need for journal editors and publishers to enforce the ARRIVE guidelines and to monitor its implementation!