Animal Study Registry is an online registry for the

preregistration Preregistration is the practice of registering the hypotheses, methods, and/or analyses of a scientific study before it is conducted. This can include analyzing primary data or secondary data. Clinical trial registration is similar, although it may ...

of research studies involving animals. Animal Study Registry was launched in January 2019 and can be used by scientists worldwide.

History

The reproducibility of animal test results in biomedical research has been questioned repeatedly in the past. Discussions about this

replication crisis The replication crisis (also called the replicability crisis and the reproducibility crisis) is an ongoing methodological crisis in which the results of many scientific studies are difficult or impossible to reproduce. Because the reproducibili ...

have already reached the public. In clinical research, the call for transparency led to the introduction of clinical trial registries that disclose the experimental design of clinical trials before the study is conducted. In order to increase the transparency and the quality in the field of preclinical and basic research, the establishment of so-called centralized animal study registries was suggested. The German Federal Institute for Risk Assessment (BfR), as a scientifically independent research institution, has decided to provide an international freely accessible platform for the pre-registration of studies involving animal experiments.

Goal

The causes for the

in biomedical research are being intensively discussed within the scientific community. The

publication bias In published academic research, publication bias occurs when the outcome of an experiment or research study biases the decision to publish or otherwise distribute it. Publishing only results that show a significant finding disturbs the balance o ...

was identified as one main reason for the lack of reproducibility of research results. This means, only significant and novel results are published while null results are never revealed, which leads to a distorted view of the state of research. Furthermore, poor study design, poor statistical planning and incomplete method description were, among others, identified as further reasons for non-reproducibility. The purpose of Animal Study Registry is to register animal experiments with detailed information on methods, working hypotheses and biometric planning prior to the start of the study. Registration of the study plan could reduce the

and prevent practices like

data dredging Data dredging (also known as data snooping or ''p''-hacking) is the misuse of data analysis to find patterns in data that can be presented as statistically significant, thus dramatically increasing and understating the risk of false positives. ...

. Indeed, Scientists would have to justify in the future why they differed from the original project planning or why some results were not published. The detailed query of the methods as well as the statistical planning supports the scientists in the study preparation and can thus increase the quality of as well as the reproducibility of the animal experiments. Results from animal experiments that are not published or whose informative value is impaired due to poor study quality can lead to animal experiments being unnecessarily repeated.

References

Research organizations {{organisation-stub