ArticleLab animal2017
Systematic heterogenization for better reproducibility in animal experimentation.
Article in Lab animal, 2017. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 28 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
28 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it.
- Pooled it
- Regulation of Periodontal Ligament Autophagy by Super-Activated Platelet Lysate in a Rat Maxillary Expansion Model.Drug design, development and therapy · 2026Article
- Precise identification of respiratory system air leakage via dynamic ventilator waveform monitoring: a controlled trial to improve mechanical ventilation care efficiency.Respiratory research · 2025Article
- A call to action to address critical flaws and bias in laboratory animal experiments and preclinical research.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Testing the reproducibility of ecological studies on insect behavior in a multi-laboratory setting identifies opportunities for improving experimental rigor.PLoS biology · 2025Article
- Discordance between preclinical and clinical testing of Na V 1.7-selective inhibitors for pain.Pain · 2025Review
- A paradigm shift in translational psychiatry through rodent neuroethology.Molecular psychiatry · 2023Review
- The rearing environment persistently modulates mouse phenotypes from the molecular to the behavioural level.PLoS biology · 2022Article
- Comparative Analysis of the Pharmacological Activity of Bis(3,5-di-Tert-Butyl-4-Hydroxyphenylthiolate)Dimethylol in Different Modes of Administration on a Mouse Model of Melanoma B16 Tumor Growth.Bulletin of experimental biology and medicine · 2022Article
- Environmental Enrichment for Rats and Mice Housed in Laboratories: A Metareview.Animals : an open access journal from MDPI · 2022Review
- Unified ethical principles and an animal research 'Helsinki' declaration as foundations for international collaboration.Current research in neurobiology · 2022Review
- Role of Environment and Experimenter in Reproducibility of Behavioral Studies With Laboratory Mice.Frontiers in behavioral neuroscience · 2022Article
- Roadbumps at the Crossroads of Integrating Behavioral andFrontiers in toxicology · 2022Review
- Improving rigor and reproducibility in nonhuman primate research.American journal of primatology · 2021Review
- Meta-analysis of variation suggests that embracing variability improves both replicability and generalizability in preclinical research.PLoS biology · 2021Article
- Experimental replications in animal trials.Laboratory animals · 2021Article
- Combining Animal Welfare With Experimental Rigor to Improve Reproducibility in Behavioral Neuroscience.Frontiers in behavioral neuroscience · 2021Review
- Incorporating inter-individual variability in experimental design improves the quality of results of animal experiments.PloS one · 2021Article
- It is time for an empirically informed paradigm shift in animal research.Nature reviews. Neuroscience · 2020Article
- Improving reproducibility in animal research by splitting the study population into several 'mini-experiments'.Scientific reports · 2020Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
1 author.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
The scientific literature is full of articles discussing poor reproducibility of findings from animal experiments as well as failures to translate results from preclinical animal studies to clinical trials in humans. Critics even go so far as to talk about a "reproducibility crisis" in the life sciences, a novel headword that increasingly finds its way into numerous high-impact journals. Viewed from a cynical perspective, Fett's law of the lab "Never replicate a successful experiment" has thus taken on a completely new meaning. So far, poor reproducibility and translational failures in animal experimentation have mostly been attributed to biased animal data, methodological pitfalls, current publication ethics and animal welfare constraints. More recently, the concept of standardization has also been identified as a potential source of these problems. By reducing within-experiment variation, rigorous standardization regimes limit the inference to the specific experimental conditions. In this way, however, individual phenotypic plasticity is largely neglected, resulting in statistically significant but possibly irrelevant findings that are not reproducible under slightly different conditions. By contrast, systematic heterogenization has been proposed as a concept to improve representativeness of study populations, contributing to improved external validity and hence improved reproducibility. While some first heterogenization studies are indeed very promising, it is still not clear how this approach can be transferred into practice in a logistically feasible and effective way. Thus, further research is needed to explore different heterogenization strategies as well as alternative routes toward better reproducibility in animal experimentation.
Indexed as
Identifiers
29296016What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.