Methods and findings in experimental and clinical pharmacology
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Methods Find Exp Clin Pharmacol · Sep 2005
ReviewSpecification of laboratory animal use in scientific articles: current low detail in the journals' instructions for authors and some proposals.
The scientific article communicates results of research to other investigators; therefore, it must contain a complete description of the experiment to help other researchers when designing their future investigations. However, poorly detailed data on laboratory animal use is given in published articles. Despite the well-known and important contribution of the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE) to standardize scientific writing and submission of manuscripts to biomedical journals, no specific instructions on the reporting of animal use are given in the ICMJE Uniform Requirements and, therefore, most journals do not detail this to the authors. ⋯ The present article relates some proposals for helping authors when reporting animal use in scientific articles. These proposals are not only based on previous guidelines for animal specifications, but also on Instructions for Authors from journals specialized in Laboratory Animal Science. These proposals are classified into major and minor issues, and they are located in the corresponding parts of the article, as defined by the Introduction, Methods, Results, and Discussion (IMRAD) method.