Toward Good In Vitro Reporting Standards (original) (raw)

Authors

Thomas Hartung Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, Center for Alternatives to Animal Testing (CAAT), Baltimore, MD, USA and University of Konstanz, CAAT-Europe, Konstanz, Germany http://orcid.org/0000-0003-1359-7689
Rob de Vries SYRCLE (SYstematic Review Centre for Laboratory Animal Experimentation), Department for Health Evidence (section HTA), Radboud Institute for Health Sciences, Radboud University Medical Center, Nijmegen, The Netherlands
Sebastian Hoffmann seh consulting + services, Paderborn, Germany
Helena T. Hogberg Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, Center for Alternatives to Animal Testing (CAAT), Baltimore, MD, USA
Lena Smirnova Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, Center for Alternatives to Animal Testing (CAAT), Baltimore, MD, USA
Katya Tsaioun Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, Center for Alternatives to Animal Testing (CAAT), Baltimore, MD, USA http://orcid.org/0000-0002-8378-0430
Paul Whaley Lancaster Environment Centre, Lancaster University, Lancaster, UK
Marcel Leist University of Konstanz, CAAT-Europe, Konstanz, Germany http://orcid.org/0000-0002-3778-8693

DOI:

Keywords:

scientific reporting, in vitro, alternatives to animal testing, cell culture, documentation

Abstract

A good experiment reported badly is worthless. Meaningful contributions to the body of science are made by sharing the full methodology and results so that they can be evaluated and reproduced by peers. Erroneous and incomplete reporting does not do justice to the resources spent on conducting the experiment and the time peers spend reading the article. In theory peer-review should ensure adequate reporting – in practice it does not. Many areas have developed reporting standards and checklists to support the adequate reporting of scientific efforts, but in vitro research still has no generally accepted criteria. It is characterized by a “Wild West” or “anything goes” attitude. Such a culture may undermine trust in the reproducibility of animal-free methods, and thus parallel the “reproducibility crisis” discussed for other life science fields. The increasing data retrieval needs of computational approaches (in extreme as “big data” and artificial intelligence) makes reporting quality even more important so that the scientific community can take full advantage of the results.
The first priority of reporting standards is to ensure the completeness and transparency of information provided (data focus). The second tier is a quality of data display that makes information digestible and easy to grasp, compare and further analyze (information focus). This article summarizes a series of initiatives geared towards improving the quality of in vitro work and its reporting. This shall ultimately lead to Good In Vitro Reporting Standards (GIVReSt).

Issue

Section

Food for Thought ...

License

Articles are distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is appropriately cited (CC-BY). Copyright on any article in ALTEX is retained by the author(s).

How to Cite

Hartung, T., de Vries, R., Hoffmann, S., Hogberg, H. T., Smirnova, L., Tsaioun, K., Whaley, P., & Leist, M. (2019). Toward Good In Vitro Reporting Standards. ALTEX - Alternatives to Animal Experimentation, 36(1), 3-17. https://doi.org/10.14573/altex.1812191