The ARRIVE guidelines 2.0: updated guidelines for reporting animal research

Improving the reproducibility of biomedical research is a major challenge. Transparent and accurate reporting is vital to this process; it allows readers to assess the reliability of the findings and repeat or build upon the work of other researchers. The ARRIVE guidelines (Animal Research: Reporting In Vivo Experiments) were developed in 2010 to help authors and journals identify the minimum information necessary to report in publications describing in vivo experiments. Despite widespread endorsement by the scientific community, the impact of ARRIVE on the transparency of reporting in animal research publications has been limited. We have revised the ARRIVE guidelines to update them and facilitate their use in practice. The revised guidelines are published alongside this paper. This explanation and elaboration document was developed as part of the revision. It provides further information about each of the 21 items in ARRIVE 2.0, including the rationale and supporting evidence for their inclusion in the guidelines, elaboration of details to report, and examples of good reporting from the published literature. This document also covers advice and best practice in the design and conduct of animal studies to support researchers in improving standards from the start of the experimental design process through to publication.

ABSTRACT Progress in basic and clinical research is slowed when researchers fail to provide a complete and accurate report of how a study was designed, executed, and the results analyzed. Publishing rigorous scientific research involves a full description of the methods, materials, procedures, and outcomes. Investigators may fail to provide a complete description of how their study was designed and executed because they may not know how to accurately report the information or the mechanisms are not in place to facilitate transparent reporting. Here, we provide an overview of how authors can write manuscripts in a transparent and thorough manner. We introduce a set of reporting criteria that can be used for publishing, including recommendations on reporting the experimental design and statistical approaches. We also discuss how to accurately visualize the results and provide recommendations for peer reviewers to enhance rigor and transparency. Incorporating transparency practices into research manuscripts will significantly improve the reproducibility of the results by independent laboratories.