Tools for better research

It is important that you plan your studies in animal experiments to obtain reliable results. It makes your results more secure, but also prevents that you use animals unnecessarily.

Once you have done your studies, it is important that you report data and results that you have collected and obtained. In this way, we can avoid unnecessary studies with or without animals in the future. It is also important to report negative data when you do not get the expected result. It increases knowledge about what works and does not work - and we can avoid unnecessary animal experiments.

Prepare your study

There are some tools that help you prepare a study with animal experiments to ensure reliable results. There are also resources that help you improve your study design.

To help researchers the Norwegian 3Rs Center Norecopa has introduced international guidelines for better research planning. The guidelines are frequently updated to follow current best practice and are called PREPARE, which is a shortening for Planning Research and Experimental Procedures on Animals: Recommendations for Excellence.

• PREPARE (norecopa.no)

With the tool EDA you can get valuable suggestions for how to improve your study design. It helps you to minimize the number of animals used and can help you find suitable statistical methods to analyse your results. EDA is developed by the British 3Rs Center NC3Rs and stands for Experimental Design Assistant.

• The Experimental Design Assistant EDA (nc3rs.org.uk)

Report your results

Reporting your results is important and can help minimize unnecessary future studies. Both expected and unexpected data is important to report to help other researchers to improve their research. Unnecessary studies lead to unnecessary animal use. Openness and transparency make research better. There are many tools to help you report your results and we have compiled the most used ones.

The British 3Rs Center NC3Rs has produced guidelines for reporting results. The guidelines help you both when writing and when reviewing articles. The guidelines are called ARRIVE, which is a shortening for Animal Research: Reporting of In Vivo Experiments.

• ARRIVE Guidelines (arriveguidelines.org)

Systematic reviews and meta-analyses gather information from several previous studies and provide an overall picture of an issue. To help you to prepare and present systematic reviews and meta-analyses, there is a tool called PRISMA. PRISMA stands for Transparent Reporting of Systematic Reviews and Meta Analysis.

• PRISMA Transparent Reporting of Systematic Reviews and Meta-analyses (prisma-statement.org)

Case studies

Case studies can provide valuable information about what has been studied, and more importantly what works for who and how. Therefore it is important to report results from case studies. In order to reduce bias and to increase transparency, an international group of experts has developed guidelines for reporting case studies. These are called CARE, which stands for Reporting guidelines for Case Reports.

• Case Reports Guidelines (care-statement.org)