The irony of bad reporting. EAEers time to pull your socks up

#MS Research. Researchers and journals need to pull their socks up. This is not about #stem cells or #CCSVI but bad # Science

Baker D, Lidster K, Sottomayor A, Amor S. Two Years Later: Journals Are Not Yet Enforcing the ARRIVE Guidelines on Reporting Standards for Pre-Clinical Animal Studies. PLoS Biol. 2014;12(1):e1001756


There is growing concern that poor experimental design and lack of transparent reporting contribute to the frequent failure of pre-clinical animal studies to translate into treatments for human disease. In 2010, the Animal Research: Reporting of In Vivo Experiments (ARRIVE) guidelines were introduced to help improve reporting standards. They were published in PLOS Biology and endorsed by funding agencies and publishers and their journals, including PLOS, Nature research journals, and other top-tier journals. Yet our analysis of papers published in PLOS and Nature journals indicates that there has been very little improvement in reporting standards since then. This suggests that authors, referees, and editors generally are ignoring guidelines, and the editorial endorsement is yet to be effectively implemented.

We have posted on this before (click here), but his paper shows that the reporting standards in papers of EAEologists are pretty bad and many journals do not enforce their own policies. Most scientists clearly do not care about transparent reporting. They need to improve and take note!

Why does this mean anything to MSers, well it is false hope. 

These studies are treatments of tomorrow,but without quality control in the system many will turn out to be unreproducible guff. 

The ARRIVE guidelines are intended to help people use animals in a more transparent and useful way.

However,

Funny thing is....Guideline 1 of ARRIVE is have an informative title. Should it not have been "...pre-clinical multiple sclerosis studies" and Guideline 2 is have a clear, descriptive abstract. 

However in their desire to have a paper that is more generalised the journal (PLOS Biology), has ensured that one message has been diluted to nothing. This is specifically, that EAEologists need to pull up their socks, which is really the target audience. This has been missed.

As such the Pubmed search engine does not pick this paper up following a search of "multiple sclerosis" or "EAE" or "encephalomyelitis" etc.

Unfortunately, this allows the intended audience to remain blissfully unaware that their research outputs could be much improved...

Spread the word(Tweet) on MS sites and read this paper...they need to improve!

coI This work from Team G

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