Improving laboratory animal welfare

Systematic reviews of animal experiments (SR of AE) have a great potential to improve laboratory animal welfare. However, at the moment they are not commonly used in laboratory animal science, even though they are generally regarded by professionals in the field of evidence-based medicine as the highest level of medical evidence, and they are already standard practice for clinical studies. Systematic reviews of animal experiments allow others to replicate and build on previously published work, diminish the number of animals needed in animal experimentation, improve animal welfare and improve patient safety. Collecting and analysing all available literature before starting an animal experiment is important and it is indispensable when writing a systematic review of animal research. Writing such reviews prevents unnecessary duplication of animal studies and thus unnecessary animal use. One of the factors currently inhibiting the production of high-quality SRs in laboratory animal science is the fact that searching for all available literature concerning animal experiments is difficult. Therefore, this study set out to assess the quality of the search strategies used in current systematic reviews of animal experiments, in order to evaluate the areas that need improving.