Compliance to guidelines in reporting animal research: A case study

Case: An author submitted a paper to an international journal to report a pre-clinical trial. The study tested the efficacy and safety of using a new medical device on an animal model. However, the journal editor wrote to the author asking whether all necessary regulations had been followed and requested him to submit the ARRIVE checklist. The author was not sure of what regulations he was expected to follow and had not heard of the ARRIVE checklist. He therefore approached Editage Insights for guidance.

Action: Our experts explained to the author that the ARRIVE(Animal Research: Reporting of In Vivo Experiments) guidelines are international guidelines for reporting studies involving animals, and the ARRIVE checklist is a form that should be filled and submitted along with the manuscript as a supplementary document for any study on animals. We guided the author on the details to be included in this form.

However, while filling the form, one area of concern came to light. The study did not have the approval of a national or an international ethical committee. The author explained that this was because the author’s home country did not have any ethical committee for experiments involving animals. Our experts asked him to explain this in the checklist and also to write a separate email to the editor explaining this problem.

The editor was satisfied with the details that the author provided in the checklist, and agreed to accept the approval of the author’s institutional review board in the absence of a national ethical committee. The author had this approval, but it was in the author’s native language. However, the editor accepted this, saying that this could be translated at the journal end.  

Summary: Journals receive submissions from different research groups based in different countries. However, guidelines governing the use and care of animals in scientific research vary across nations and institutions. Therefore, most journals encourage the use of the ARRIVE (Animal Research: Reporting of In Vivo Experiments) guidelines to standardize and improve the reporting of research using animals. The guidelines include a checklist of 20 items “describing the minimum information that all scientific publications reporting research using animals should include,” such as the sex and number of animals in the study, their husbandry and care, details of their health status, the experimental procedures used, including dosage of drugs, anesthesia, method of euthanasia, etc.

Most governments and the scientific community in general aim to have a humane approach towards animals used in research, and to that effect try to control the number of times individual animals may be used; the total number of animals used; the conditions in which they are housed, and the degree of pain that may be inflicted. The ARRIVE guidelines are a step forward in this direction. It is therefore highly recommended that authors and journals follow these guidelines.