Reporting practices of anesthetic and analgesic use in rodent orthopedic research

The Animal Research: Reporting of In Vivo Experiments (ARRIVE) guidelines, along with the updated ARRIVE 2.0, provide a crucial framework for transparent reporting in animal research. These guidelines enhance the quality and reproducibility of studies while supporting animal welfare. However, concerns persist regarding the reporting practices of biomedical researchers in scientific articles related to anesthesia and analgesia despite the endorsement of ARRIVE guidelines, as has been demonstrated in previous descriptive analyses. The current study systematically reviews articles published from 2016 to 2023 that involve rodent orthopedic surgeries. These procedures were selected as our focus given that anesthetics and analgesics are essential for such high impact procedures. We highlight significant reporting gaps, noting that anesthetic and analgesic details were missing in 29.4% and 74.8% of the articles, respectively. Our findings reveal no correlation between reporting completeness and journal impact factors, indicating that this issue generalized across journals. Furthermore, among articles that did report analgesia use, we observed a low prevalence of multimodal analgesia. Overall, this study underscores the urgent need to develop effective strategies to improve reporting of anesthesia and analgesia in animal studies to enhance ethical standards, animal welfare, and the robustness and reproducibility of research.