An official website of the United States government.
Michael FW Festing.
Provides an interactive short course on experimental design for research scientists working with laboratory animals.
Experimental Design
Michael FW Festing.
Animal experiments must be well designed, efficiently executed, correctly analyzed, clearly presented, and correctly interpreted to be ethically acceptable. This page sets out the principles of good design.
National Centre for the Replacement, Refinement and Reduction of Animals in Research.
Reduction refers to methods, such as appropriate experimental design and statistical analysis, which enable researchers to obtain comparable levels of information from fewer animals, or to obtain more information from the same number of animals.
Also see:
- ARRIVE guidelines 2.0 for reporting animal use.
- Experimental Design Assistant (EDA) for reporting animal use.
Institute for Laboratory Animal Research (ILAR).
A guide to improving experimental design and statistical analysis of animal experimentation.
Norecopa.
The PREPARE website contains hundreds of links to more specific guidelines on topics such as harm-benefit assessment, housing, blood sampling, anaesthesia and humane euthanasia.
Animal Ethics Infolink.
Information on reducing the number of animals used in experimentation through carefully designed scientific, statistically valid studies.
Reduction of Animal Use: Experimental Design and Quality of Experiments ( pdf | 2.26 MB )
International Journal of Laboratory Animal Science and Welfare.
This review article examines experimental design and statistical methods in three articles from toxicological journal.
Nature Research.
This collection highlights important statistical issues that scientists should be aware of and provides practical advice to help them improve the rigor of their work.
Public Library of Science (“PLOS”).
Report of the findings of a systematic survey of reporting, experimental design and statistical analysis in published biomedical research using laboratory animals.