ArticleScientific reports2019
Heterogenising study samples across testing time improves reproducibility of behavioural data.
Article in Scientific reports, 2019. 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.
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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.
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Who cites it
28 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it.
- A systematic review on the effect of individual characteristics and management practices on equine cognition.Animal cognition · 2025Pooled it
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- Human ostension enhances attentiveness but not performance in domestic pigs.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
- Home cage voluntary alcohol consumption increases binge drinking without affecting abstinence-related depressive-like behaviors or operant responding in crossed high alcohol-preferring mice (cHAPs).Alcohol (Fayetteville, N.Y.) · 2024Article
- Structural enrichment for laboratory mice: exploring the effects of novelty and complexity.Frontiers in veterinary science · 2023Article
- The power of a touch: Regular touchscreen training but not its termination affects hormones and behavior in mice.Frontiers in behavioral neuroscience · 2023Article
- Predictive validity in drug discovery: what it is, why it matters and how to improve it.Nature reviews. Drug discovery · 2022Review
- Effects of α5 GABACNS neuroscience & therapeutics · 2022Article
- Controlling the uncontrolled variation in the diet induced obese mouse by microbiomic characterization.Scientific reports · 2022Article
- Blueprints for measuring natural behavior.iScience · 2022Review
- Do multiple experimenters improve the reproducibility of animal studies?PLoS biology · 2022Article
- Systematic heterogenisation to improve reproducibility in animal studies.PLoS biology · 2022Article
- Meta-analysis of variation suggests that embracing variability improves both replicability and generalizability in preclinical research.PLoS biology · 2021Article
- Targeting Immune Cell Trafficking - Insights From Research Models and Implications for Future IBD Therapy.Frontiers in immunology · 2021Review
- Measuring Behavior in the Home Cage: Study Design, Applications, Challenges, and Perspectives.Frontiers in behavioral neuroscience · 2021Article
- Improving reproducibility in animal research.Scientific reports · 2020Article
- It is time for an empirically informed paradigm shift in animal research.Nature reviews. Neuroscience · 2020Article
- The impact of handling technique and handling frequency on laboratory mouse welfare is sex-specific.Scientific reports · 2020Article
- Improving reproducibility in animal research by splitting the study population into several 'mini-experiments'.Scientific reports · 2020Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
6 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
The ongoing debate on the reproducibility crisis in the life sciences highlights the need for a rethinking of current methodologies. Since the trend towards ever more standardised experiments is at risk of causing highly idiosyncratic results, an alternative approach has been suggested to improve the robustness of findings, particularly from animal experiments. This concept, referred to as "systematic heterogenisation", postulates increased external validity and hence, improved reproducibility by introducing variation systematically into a single experiment. However, the implementation of this concept in practice requires the identification of suitable heterogenisation factors. Here we show that the time of day at which experiments are conducted has a significant impact on the reproducibility of behavioural differences between two mouse strains, C57BL/6J and DBA/2N. Specifically, we found remarkably varying strain effects on anxiety, exploration, and learning, depending on the testing time, i.e. morning, noon or afternoon. In a follow-up simulation approach, we demonstrate that the systematic inclusion of two different testing times significantly improved reproducibility between replicate experiments. Our results emphasise the potential of time as an effective and easy-to-handle heterogenisation factor for single-laboratory studies. Its systematic variation likely improves reproducibility of research findings and hence contributes to a fundamental issue of experimental design and conduct in laboratory animal science.
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