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Do multiple experimenters improve the reproducibility of animal studies?
The credibility of scientific research has been seriously questioned by the widely claimed “reproducibility crisis”. In light of this crisis, there is a growing awareness that the rigorous standardisation of experimental conditions may contribute to poor reproducibility of animal studies. Instead, s...
Autores principales: | , , , , , , , , , , , |
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Formato: | Online Artículo Texto |
Lenguaje: | English |
Publicado: |
Public Library of Science
2022
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Materias: | |
Acceso en línea: | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9070896/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/35511779 http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pbio.3001564 |
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author | von Kortzfleisch, Vanessa Tabea Ambrée, Oliver Karp, Natasha A. Meyer, Neele Novak, Janja Palme, Rupert Rosso, Marianna Touma, Chadi Würbel, Hanno Kaiser, Sylvia Sachser, Norbert Richter, S. Helene |
author_facet | von Kortzfleisch, Vanessa Tabea Ambrée, Oliver Karp, Natasha A. Meyer, Neele Novak, Janja Palme, Rupert Rosso, Marianna Touma, Chadi Würbel, Hanno Kaiser, Sylvia Sachser, Norbert Richter, S. Helene |
author_sort | von Kortzfleisch, Vanessa Tabea |
collection | PubMed |
description | The credibility of scientific research has been seriously questioned by the widely claimed “reproducibility crisis”. In light of this crisis, there is a growing awareness that the rigorous standardisation of experimental conditions may contribute to poor reproducibility of animal studies. Instead, systematic heterogenisation has been proposed as a tool to enhance reproducibility, but a real-life test across multiple independent laboratories is still pending. The aim of this study was therefore to test whether heterogenisation of experimental conditions by using multiple experimenters improves the reproducibility of research findings compared to standardised conditions with only one experimenter. To this end, we replicated the same animal experiment in 3 independent laboratories, each employing both a heterogenised and a standardised design. Whereas in the standardised design, all animals were tested by a single experimenter; in the heterogenised design, 3 different experimenters were involved in testing the animals. In contrast to our expectation, the inclusion of multiple experimenters in the heterogenised design did not improve the reproducibility of the results across the 3 laboratories. Interestingly, however, a variance component analysis indicated that the variation introduced by the different experimenters was not as high as the variation introduced by the laboratories, probably explaining why this heterogenisation strategy did not bring the anticipated success. Even more interestingly, for the majority of outcome measures, the remaining residual variation was identified as an important source of variance accounting for 41% (CI(95) [34%, 49%]) to 72% (CI(95) [58%, 88%]) of the observed total variance. Despite some uncertainty surrounding the estimated numbers, these findings argue for systematically including biological variation rather than eliminating it in animal studies and call for future research on effective improvement strategies. |
format | Online Article Text |
id | pubmed-9070896 |
institution | National Center for Biotechnology Information |
language | English |
publishDate | 2022 |
publisher | Public Library of Science |
record_format | MEDLINE/PubMed |
spelling | pubmed-90708962022-05-06 Do multiple experimenters improve the reproducibility of animal studies? von Kortzfleisch, Vanessa Tabea Ambrée, Oliver Karp, Natasha A. Meyer, Neele Novak, Janja Palme, Rupert Rosso, Marianna Touma, Chadi Würbel, Hanno Kaiser, Sylvia Sachser, Norbert Richter, S. Helene PLoS Biol Meta-Research Article The credibility of scientific research has been seriously questioned by the widely claimed “reproducibility crisis”. In light of this crisis, there is a growing awareness that the rigorous standardisation of experimental conditions may contribute to poor reproducibility of animal studies. Instead, systematic heterogenisation has been proposed as a tool to enhance reproducibility, but a real-life test across multiple independent laboratories is still pending. The aim of this study was therefore to test whether heterogenisation of experimental conditions by using multiple experimenters improves the reproducibility of research findings compared to standardised conditions with only one experimenter. To this end, we replicated the same animal experiment in 3 independent laboratories, each employing both a heterogenised and a standardised design. Whereas in the standardised design, all animals were tested by a single experimenter; in the heterogenised design, 3 different experimenters were involved in testing the animals. In contrast to our expectation, the inclusion of multiple experimenters in the heterogenised design did not improve the reproducibility of the results across the 3 laboratories. Interestingly, however, a variance component analysis indicated that the variation introduced by the different experimenters was not as high as the variation introduced by the laboratories, probably explaining why this heterogenisation strategy did not bring the anticipated success. Even more interestingly, for the majority of outcome measures, the remaining residual variation was identified as an important source of variance accounting for 41% (CI(95) [34%, 49%]) to 72% (CI(95) [58%, 88%]) of the observed total variance. Despite some uncertainty surrounding the estimated numbers, these findings argue for systematically including biological variation rather than eliminating it in animal studies and call for future research on effective improvement strategies. Public Library of Science 2022-05-05 /pmc/articles/PMC9070896/ /pubmed/35511779 http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pbio.3001564 Text en © 2022 von Kortzfleisch et al https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) , which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. |
spellingShingle | Meta-Research Article von Kortzfleisch, Vanessa Tabea Ambrée, Oliver Karp, Natasha A. Meyer, Neele Novak, Janja Palme, Rupert Rosso, Marianna Touma, Chadi Würbel, Hanno Kaiser, Sylvia Sachser, Norbert Richter, S. Helene Do multiple experimenters improve the reproducibility of animal studies? |
title | Do multiple experimenters improve the reproducibility of animal studies? |
title_full | Do multiple experimenters improve the reproducibility of animal studies? |
title_fullStr | Do multiple experimenters improve the reproducibility of animal studies? |
title_full_unstemmed | Do multiple experimenters improve the reproducibility of animal studies? |
title_short | Do multiple experimenters improve the reproducibility of animal studies? |
title_sort | do multiple experimenters improve the reproducibility of animal studies? |
topic | Meta-Research Article |
url | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9070896/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/35511779 http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pbio.3001564 |
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