Harmonizing ecotoxicological data reporting: A guide for toxicologists and chemists

Concerns have been raised regarding the findings and reproducibility of scientific research, including ecotoxicological studies. In environmental risk assessment, controlled laboratory or field-based exposure experiments are conducted to evaluate the effects of substances towards individual species or ecosystems. Exposure experiments generate crucial data but the process of collecting such data is both time-consuming and costly, with limited emphasis on ensuring reproducibility. The value of experimental data is immense and can have multiple applications or can be made fit for secondary scientific and regulatory use. Effective re-use of ecotoxicological experimental data is often hindered by (unintended) suboptimal reporting practices such as poorly described methodologies or inconsistent reporting of units or data. The purpose of this study is to highlight the issue of insufficient reporting in ecotoxicology through examples from publications as well as to provide solutions, focusing on how the data or metadata itself is reported rather than which variables are reported from experiments. Published data and metadata on nanomaterials, neonicotinoids and per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) were analyzed to gain insight into the extent to which insufficiently reported data is present across literature.