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

Abstract

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. In a randomised controlled trial, manuscripts reporting in vivo animal research submitted to PLOS ONE (March-June 2015) were allocated to either requested completion of an ARRIVE checklist or current standard practice. We measured the change in proportion of manuscripts meeting all ARRIVE guideline checklist items between groups. We randomised 1,689 manuscripts, 1,269 were sent for peer review and 762 accepted for publication. The request to complete an ARRIVE checklist had no effect on full compliance with the ARRIVE guidelines. Details of animal husbandry (ARRIVE sub-item 9a) was the only item to show improved reporting, from 52.1% to 74.1% (X2=34.0, df=1, p=2.1x10-7). These results suggest that other approaches are required to secure greater implementation of the ARRIVE guidelines.\n\nBackgroundThere 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 (Kilkenny et al., 2009, Macleod et al., 2015). Such omissions have been shown to be associated with overestimation of effect sizes (Macleod et al., 2015, Hirst et al., 2014) and are likely to contribute, in part, to translational failure. 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 (Kilkenny et al., 2010), published in 2010.\n\nSince 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 (Baker et al., 2014, McGrath and Lilley, 2015, Gulin et al., 2015a, Avey et al., 2016). Simply endorsing the guidelines does not appear to be sufficient to encourage compliance. 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 (Han et al., 2017, Macleod and The NPQIP Collaborative Group, 2017)\n\nPLOS ONE is an open access online only journal which at the time this study began published around 32,000 research articles per year. Of these, some 5,000 described in vivo research. At present, PLOS ONE instructions to authors encourage compliance with the ARRIVE guidelines, but do not mandate checklist completion. Journals have an important role to play in ensuring that the quality of reporting in the research they publish is robust, yet the most effective mechanism by which they can achieve this remains unclear.\n\nOur aim was to test the impact on the quality of published reports of an intervention which would request, at the time of manuscript submission, that authors complete a checklist detailing where in the manuscript the various components of the ARRIVE checklist were met. This study, to our knowledge, is the first randomised controlled trial of requested ARRIVE guideline completion.