Past projects

Increasing the Reliability and Usefulness of Laboratory Stroke Research

This project, supported by the Stroke Association, will investigate the potential sources of bias that limit our ability to reproduce scientific findings from animal and other preclinical research. We aim to develop an automatically-updated and free online resource that summarises all pre-clinical studies of stroke, the drugs tested, and the quality of experiments. A further aim of this project is to inform the design of animal studies, with a focus on the 3Rs, and use patient experience to inform meaningful pre-clinical models of stroke.

Project overview on the Stroke Association website

Key contact: Dr Emily Sena

COVID-SOLES  (Systematic Online Living Evidence Summary of COVID-19 Research) 

A systematic online living evidence summary (SOLES) of all primary COVID-19 research. This crowd-sourced project uses annotations from trained volunteers to develop machine learning tools which can semi-automate the collection of evidence from relevant studies. Our COVID-SOLES web application is a free resource allowing users to interact with the collated information and interrogate the dataset.

COVID-SOLES publication - JAEHIL (open access)

COVID-SOLES data - R Shiny App

COVID-SOLES protocol - OSF

Key contact: Emma Wilson

European Quality in Preclinical Data (EQIPD)

An EU-funded public-private partnership, which aims to enhance the robustness, rigour and validity of preclinical research. Work package 2 uses historical data to determine the variables of internal and external validity in experimental design, conduct and data analysis that determines the outcome in preclinical studies. We are conducting a systematic review and meta-analysis of preclinical studies reporting the use of the Irwin or the Functional Observational Battery (FOB) tests to define those variables of internal and external validity in experimental design, conduct and data analysis that are determinants of outcome.

EQIPD website

Key contacts: Dr Emily Sena; Dr Gillian Currie

Multicenter Pre-clinical Animal Research Team (Multi-PART)

The key objective of this project is to establish and implement a platform for international multicenter pre-clinical stroke trials. It is was an international collaborative approach to overcoming the translational roadblock in neuroprotection and neuroregeneration research.

Key contact: Dr Emily Sena

IICARus

A randomised controlled trial of an Intervention to Improve Compliance with the ARRIVE guidelines (IICARus). Manuscripts reporting in vivo animal research submitted to PLOS ONE between March and June 2015 were randomly allocated to either requested completion of an ARRIVE checklist (via email) or current standard practice. The primary outcome was the between-group differences in the proportion of manuscripts meeting all ARRIVE guideline checklist subitems.

ARRIVE 2.0 Guidelines informed by IICARus project

IICARus study published in 'Research Integrity and Peer Review' (open access)

Key contact: Dr Emily Sena; Dr Kaitlyn Hair

Nature Publication Quality Improvement Project (NPQIP)

This project aimed to access a change in the editorial policy of Nature journals, and understand if it had a positive impact on reducing the risk of bias and the reporting of key experimental and analytical details.

NPQIP study published in 'BMJ Open Science' (open access)

Key contact: Professor Malcolm Macleod