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. 2019 Jun 12:4:12.
doi: 10.1186/s41073-019-0069-3. eCollection 2019.

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

Kaitlyn Hair  1 , Malcolm R Macleod  1 , Emily S Sena  1 ; IICARus Collaboration
Collaborators, Affiliations

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

Kaitlyn Hair et al. Res Integr Peer Rev. .

Abstract

Background: 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.

Methods: In a randomised controlled trial, manuscripts reporting in vivo animal research submitted to PLOS ONE (March-June 2015) were randomly allocated to either requested completion of an ARRIVE checklist or current standard practice. Authors, academic editors, and peer reviewers were blinded to group allocation. Trained reviewers performed outcome adjudication in duplicate by assessing manuscripts against an operationalised version of the ARRIVE guidelines that consists 108 items. Our primary outcome was the between-group differences in the proportion of manuscripts meeting all ARRIVE guideline checklist subitems.

Results: We randomised 1689 manuscripts (control: n = 844, intervention: n = 845), of which 1269 were sent for peer review and 762 (control: n = 340; intervention: n = 332) accepted for publication. No manuscript in either group achieved full compliance with the ARRIVE checklist. Details of animal husbandry (ARRIVE subitem 9b) was the only subitem to show improvements in reporting, with the proportion of compliant manuscripts rising from 52.1 to 74.1% (X 2 = 34.0, df = 1, p = 2.1 × 10-7) in the control and intervention groups, respectively.

Conclusions: These results suggest that altering the editorial process to include requests for a completed ARRIVE checklist is not enough to improve compliance with the ARRIVE guidelines. Other approaches, such as more stringent editorial policies or a targeted approach on key quality items, may promote improvements in reporting.

Keywords: ARRIVE; Randomised controlled trial; Reporting guidelines.

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Conflict of interest statement

Competing interestsES and MM are in receipt of competitive research grants from the NC3Rs who developed the ARRIVE guidelines. SL was funded by an NC3Rs PhD studentship. ES, MM, DH, and NK are members of an NC3Rs working group to review the ARRIVE guidelines (https://www.nc3rs.org.uk/revision-arrive-guidelines). CM, GM, AC, GA, and MD were all editors at PLOS ONE throughout the duration of the study. ES is Editor-in-Chief at BMJ Open Science. All other authors have no other competing interests to declare.

Figures

Fig. 1
Fig. 1
Manuscript processing
Fig. 2
Fig. 2
Percentage compliance for each ARRIVE subitem; percentage compliance for each ARRIVE subitem with 95% confidence intervals; asterisk denotes statistical significance; figure divided into article sections specified in the ARRIVE guidelines
Fig. 3
Fig. 3
Compliance by country; percentage compliance for each ARRIVE subitem for manuscripts in each country (for countries with N manuscripts ≥10)
Fig. 4
Fig. 4
Landis 4 individual compliance; percentage compliance for each Landis criteria present in the ARRIVE guidelines with 95% confidence intervals
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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