Reporting Animal Studies Good Science and a Duty of Care 英文参考文献.docVIP

Editorial ReportingAnimalStudies:GoodScienceandaDutyof Care CatrionaJ.MacCallum* SeniorEditor,PLoSBiology,PublicLibraryofScience,Cambridge,UnitedKingdom Estimates of the number of non-human animals used in research vary between 10 million and 50 million [1,2]. As a publisher,wereceivesubmissionsfromscoresofresearchgroupsin numerous different countries that report experimental results or observationaldataaboutahugevarietyoforganisms.Eachfield, each location, each type of experiment, and each organism may carry a different set of standards governing how the research is approvedataninstitutionalornationallevelandhowthestudyis reported. Despite this eclectic mix of guidelines and standards, many species used in research are not regulated in any formal manner. age of the animal involved, and so on. In other words, they contained a catalogue of basic and fundamental errors that you would not expect in any properly constructed paper from a practicing scientist. Independent of any ethical issue, the consequences of such inappropriate design and inadequate reporting can have profound scientific consequences. Most preclinical laboratory experiments reveal a sex bias in choosing animals—males tend to be easier and cheaper to house and maintain—but focusing on one sex means that important sex differences are overlooked [7,8]. Moreover, badly reported or unreportedstudiespotentiallydiminishtheextenttowhichanimal models of disease can reliably inform us about clinical interven- tions to treat the disease in question. In a recent PLoS Medicine article, van der Worp et al. [9] explain how such ‘‘failed translation’’ can arise, for example, when only positive results arepublishedandthesedataareaggregatedandincludedinmeta- analyses, systematic reviews, or other synthetic analyses. The impactofsuchpublicationbiaswasmadeclearinarelatedPLoS Biology article, which analyzed published papers on the interven- tionstestedinanimalstudiesofacuteischaemicstroke.Senaetal. [10] estimate