ArticleScientific reports2020
The "completely randomised" and the "randomised block" are the only experimental designs suitable for widespread use in pre-clinical research.
Article in Scientific reports, 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 24 papers.
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Who cites it
24 citing papers in PubMed.
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- A call to action to address critical flaws and bias in laboratory animal experiments and preclinical research.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Efficacy of community groups as a social prescription for senior health-insights from a natural experiment during the COVID-19 lockdown.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- Longitudinal Study of Changes in Ammonia, Carbon Dioxide, Humidity and Temperature in Individually Ventilated Cages Housing Female and Male C57BL/6N Mice during Consecutive Cycles of Weekly and Bi-Weekly Cage Changes.Animals : an open access journal from MDPI · 2024Article
- The impact of hedonic social media use during microbreaks on employee resources recovery.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- Maternal n-3 enriched diet reprograms the offspring neurovascular transcriptome and blunts inflammation induced by endotoxin in the neonate.Journal of neuroinflammation · 2024Article
- Older spiny mice (Acomys cahirinus) have delayed and spatially heterogenous ear wound regeneration.Biology open · 2024Article
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- Effects of home-cage elevation on behavioral tests in mice.Brain and behavior · 2023Article
- A Review of the Effects of Some Extrinsic Factors on Mice Used in Research.Comparative medicine · 2023Review
- Mpox multi-antigen mRNA vaccine candidates by a simplified manufacturing strategy afford efficient protection against lethal orthopoxvirus challenge.Emerging microbes & infections · 2023Article
- Protective Effect of Neutral Electrolyzed Saline on Gentamicin-Induced Nephrotoxicity: Evaluation of Histopathologic Parameters in a Murine Model.Medicina (Kaunas, Lithuania) · 2023Article
- Between two stools: preclinical research, reproducibility, and statistical design of experiments.BMC research notes · 2022Article
- Article
- Weight Gain, Glucose Tolerance, and the Gut Microbiome of Male C57BL/6J Mice Housed on Corncob or Paper Bedding and Fed Normal or High-Fat Diet.Journal of the American Association for Laboratory Animal Science : JAALAS · 2021Article
- Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
1 author.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Too many pre-clinical experiments are giving results which cannot be reproduced. This may be because the experiments are incorrectly designed. In "Completely randomized" (CR) and "Randomised block" (RB) experimental designs, both the assignment of treatments to experimental subjects and the order in which the experiment is done, are randomly determined. These designs have been used successfully in agricultural and industrial research and in clinical trials for nearly a century without excessive levels of irreproducibility. They must also be used in pre-clinical research if the excessive level of irreproducibility is to be eliminated. A survey of 100 papers involving mice and rats was used to determine whether scientists had used the CR or RB designs. The papers were assigned to three categories "Design acceptable", "Randomised to treatment groups", so of doubtful validity, or "Room for improvement". Only 32 ± 4.7% of the papers fell into the first group, although none of them actually named either the CR or RB design. If the current high level of irreproducibility is to be eliminated, it is essential that scientists engaged in pre-clinical research use "Completely randomised" (CR), "Randomised block" (RB), or one of the more specialised named experimental designs described in textbooks on the subject.
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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.