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Text-mining analysis finds that studies fall short of best practice — despite guidelines introduced in 2010.
Article toolsThe largest-ever analysis of the quality of mouse studies reveals that as recently as 2014, only around 50% of research papers recorded both the sex and age of the animals used — key details needed for others to assess and reproduce the research1.
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The analysis, which used software to trawl through the text of more than 15,000 open-access papers published between 1994 and 2014, also reveals the preferences of different research fields. Cardiovascular research tends to use male mice, whereas research on infectious diseases such as HIV and tuberculosis favours female mice, for example.
The study is “the strongest evidence about sex and age bias through biomedical research to date”, say its authors.
Sex matters
Many researchers have pointed out that male and female mice — like men and women — can have different responses to drugs or different behaviours in laboratory experiments. One study last year, for instance, found2 that although inhibiting the function of immune cells called microglia helps to relieve pain in male mice, it doesn’t do so in female mice. The difference might explain why some clinical trials of pain drugs have failed.
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