Deans' stroke musings: Complying With the National Institutes of Health Guidelines and Principles for Rigor and Reproducibility

Our fucking failures of stroke associations should have enough employees that can monitor that stroke research meets these guidelines. But they won't, it would be too much like hard work. They would have to keep track of all research and do a better job than I can. If they were my minions they would accomplish that with no questions asked.
http://atvb.ahajournals.org/content/36/7/1303.extract?etoc

+ Author Affiliations

From the Saha Cardiovascular Research Center and Department of Physiology, University of Kentucky, Lexington (A.D.); Department of Medicine and Robarts Research Institute, Schulich School of Medicine and Dentistry, Western University, London, Ontario, Canada (R.A.H.); Department of Medicine, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (N.M.); Departments of Medicine and Department of Genetics, Perelman School of Medicine, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia (D.J.R.); Diabetes Research Program, Division of Endocrinology, Department of Medicine, New York University Langone Medical Center (A.M.S.); and Institute for Cardiovascular Prevention, and Department of Medicine, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität (LMU) and German Centre for Cardiovascular Research (DZHK), partner site Munich Heart Alliance, Munich, Germany (C.W.).

Correspondence to Alan Daugherty, University of Kentucky, Saha Cardiovascular Research Center, 741 S Limestone - BBSRB Room 243, Lexington, KY 40536. E-mail Alan.Daugherty@uky.edu

In 2014, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) delivered a document that described the principles and guidelines for reporting preclinical research (https://www.nih.gov/research-training/rigor-reproducibility/principles-guidelines-reporting-preclinical-research). These principles and guidelines were developed in a workshop that addressed the concern of reproducibility of preclinical research and were built on previous NIH recommendations for transparency in reporting data.¹ A major driving force behind this effort stemmed from concerns voiced by the pharmaceutical industry that described their failure to replicate studies performed in academic laboratories^2,3 These issues have also attracted attention through commentaries in both scientific journals⁴ and the lay press.⁵

As guardians of a large investment of public funds, the NIH aspires to promote confidence in science through enhanced reporting of protocols and data in journals, focusing in particular on reproducibility of results of similar experiments performed in different laboratories. A wide spectrum of scientific leaders, including many journal editors, attended the meeting at which this document was developed. The consequent report emphasized the need for journals to modify their editorial processes in several respects. These included requirement that authors document a detailed description of statistical analyses and data reporting with the aim of increasing transparency, sharing of data and materials, and establishing best practices for reagent verification. An additional requirement was for journals to establish a standard mechanism for the reporting of refutations of published work. All American Heart Association journals, including ATVB, have endorsed these NIH guidelines.

The NIH guidelines state specifically that “the journal assumes responsibility …

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