Millions of animals missing from scientific studies
Full disclosure, Anita is a lab mate.<p>One of the things that is latent in this article is that in the US you are supposed to have done a power analysis in order to justify the number of animals you are using in your study. Almost no one does this, and it is not surprising -- if you are doing cutting edge research you are in unknown unknown territory and any power analysis is likely to be no better than a guess. In a sense it is farcical that exploratory research needs to pretend that it is always successful.<p>Countless animal experiments are uninterpretable simply because they were poorly executed by first year graduate students. There is no other way to learn. Write them off as animals used for training if we want full accounting, but researchers&#x27; time is scarce enough as it is so asking them to publish uninterpretable results is a non-starter.<p>On the other hand I think it is important to publish as many results as possible to avoid file draw effects etc. Data publishing might be one way around this, but at the moment few labs anywhere in any field have the know-how to publish raw data for negative results, even if it is just sticking files in a git repo and getting a DOI from zenodo.