Just ‘N’ mice:using citation analysis to evaluate the efficiency of animal research

Animal research is questioned on both ethical grounds and for issues with the translation of results to human medicine. Regardless of these issues many people argue that animal research benefits society solely for the creation of new knowledge, and this reason alone supports the legitimacy of continuing animal research. In this study we evaluate this claim using citation analysis, with the creation of a metric that summarises the number of animals used for each citation gained. We termed this the Animal Efficiency Score. In this equation the citations accumulated for a piece of research act as a proxy for ‘knowledge gained’.15 journals in the field of oncology, including journal from Q1-3, were targeted for analysis. Meta-data for all research articles published within these journals during 2017-18 were collected from Web of Science. Animal use was determined for each article. More specific information was collected from studies that used animals, including the number of animals used, species used, and other details.Utilizing the Animal Efficiency Score on journals of three different quartiles showed no difference in knowledge gained between higher and lower quartiles of research. This was despite data also concluding that higher quartiles of research used much higher proportions of animal research than lower quartiles.Data collection was made difficult because of a consistent lack of transparency across the three quartiles of research. To account for the differences in reporting of animal usage numbers in articles, each article was also scored on its transparency.