By Sloka Iyengar A basic scientist in the clinic After nine years studying epilepsy, and despite deep immersion into the scientific literature and scientific methodology of epilepsy, I had yet to see a person experiencing seizures. This all changed on my first day as a clinical researcher, where I met Kevin – a boy […]
Category: Research Quality
Response: Let’s work together to explore the evidence base for all preclinical research methodologies
In response to: Drug discovery and preclinical drug development – have animal studies really failed? By Pandora Pound and Merel Ritskes-Hoitinga A case of the ‘straw man’? We came across this blog in BMJ Open Science by chance this week. The blog, entitled ‘Drug discovery and preclinical drug development – have animal studies really […]
Making research more useful: minimal reporting standards for life scientists
By Malcolm Macleod (@Maclomaclee) As researchers, we hope that our research findings are useful – that they inform future research, or lead to changes in policy or practice. Different research designs provide different levels of proof, with experimental evidence generally providing better evidence than observational studies. Even within research designs, there are factors which might […]
Why standardisation threatens reproducibility
BMJ Open Science encourages a number of initiatives to help the work that we publish be reproducible such as pre-submission manuscript checking, encouraging reporting guidelines, and asking authors to report the strengths and limitations of their experiments. However, reproducibility should also be considered at the study design stage. A recent study1 based on extensive preclinical data […]