About the tool and FAQs
The ARRIVE compliance checker tool has been designed to identify when information is missing from your manuscript, helping to ensure that you are describing your research transparently and comprehensively. This increases the impact of your studies and improves the reproducibility of animal research as a whole.
On this page
How the ARRIVE compliance checker works
Step 1. Uploading text
First you need to create an ARRIVE compliance checker account. Once this is done you can quickly assess a manuscript for adherence to the ARRIVE Essential 10 by either copying and pasting the methods and results text from a manuscript into the text upload box or by uploading a PDF.
If you are copying and pasting text (our recommended approach) we recommend you paste the information by right clicking in the text upload box and select 'paste as plain text'.
If a PDF is uploaded a text extractor, known as a parser, identifies the methods and results sections of the manuscript and reformats the information in these sections as plain text so it can be analysed by the tool. You must verify that the relevant text has been extracted correctly from the methods and results sections of the paper. Text in tables, figures and figure legends is sometimes not extracted, or not extracted well. The PDF parser cannot extract mathematical formulas and, depending on how the PDF was created, may struggle with special characters such as Greek letters and mathematical symbols. Special characters such as the degree symbol are usually not extracted.
Step 2. Submitting and processing
Once your manuscript text is submitted the text is sent to the SciScore server in the USA where it will be analysed for statements that indicate reporting of the ARRIVE Essential 10 items. The tool uses natural language processing as well as specific phrases to identify compliance marking each ARRIVE item as either 'detected' or 'not detected'. The tool has been trained on thousands of statements from across the scientific literature, but some information is not prevalent enough in animal research to train the tool to accurately detect it (e.g. reporting of the confidence interval and effect size). These items require manual review to assess compliance.
Step 3. Report
Once the ARRIVE compliance checker has finished assessing your paper, a report is generated. This is available from within the tool and a link to it is delivered to your email inbox (to the email address you used to create your account). You can read the summary on the first page of the report to quickly identify areas where reporting can be improved and then use the full report for advice on how to fulfil the requirements or each item and move towards more comprehensive and transparent reporting.
Limitations
Not all sub-items are able to be assessed with the tool and these are clearly marked as 'Not analysed' in the report. The tool will mark something as 'detected' if there is at least a single instance of this information being reported. Researchers need to verify that this information is reported for every experiment in the manuscript. To enable the binary answers 'detected' or 'not detected' for some sub-items the tool only uses part of the information required by the ARRIVE guidelines to mark that sub-item as 'detected'. For example, when checking whether the manuscript states if randomisation was or was not used to allocate experimental units to groups (item 4a), if there is a statement that mentions that randomisation was, or explicitly was not, used to allocate animals to groups the tool marks this as information 'detected', even if there is no description of the method used to create the randomisation sequence.
Frequently Asked Questions
The tool is designed to assess scientific manuscripts that describe in vivo animal research. It may not function correctly with other types of papers, for example manuscripts describing human or in vitro research, or for non-scientific publications.
Yes. Submitted text is stored by SciCrunch Inc. (the organisation that developed and maintains the tool) for a maximum of 30 days and the report generated by the ARRIVE compliance checker is deleted from the system after 10 days (giving you time to download it). Submitted information is not used for training the tool or shared to parties outside of NC3Rs and SciCrunch. See our Privacy Policy for details.
The tool uses plain text to perform the compliance check. You can submit plain text by pasting or writing text directly into the submission box. You can also upload a PDF document, the tool will extract text from the methods and results sections as plain text. Check the extracted text before submission to verify that the methods and results information has been extracted. The tool can more accurately detect information copied and pasted in to the text upload box compared to text extracted from a PDF. This is because different PDFs are coded different ways, this can affect how well the tool extracts text from the PDF.
See the question on text formats for more information on plain text.
The tool extracts text from the methods and results sections only. It does not extract text from other parts of the paper, such as the introduction, discussion or references, to ensure that the information detected when looking for adherence with the ARRIVE Essential 10 relates to the experiment being described in this paper rather than information from other experiments which might be included to put the current work in context.
Reports are typically generated within two to three minutes. A link to your report will appear in your browser and the system will also send you an email containing a link to the report. During peak times, it may take longer.
Check your junk of spam folder in case the email has been filtered into there.
If the email is not in your junk or spam folder and a link to the report has not arrived in your email inbox within 30 minutes, try resubmitting. If you still do not receive an email it could be blocked by your institutional firewall or filters. Please contact your IT department and ask them to whitelist emails from arrive@nc3rs.org.uk.
The report highlights areas where the manuscript could be improved based on the ARRIVE Essential 10. Use this guidance to revise the text and include clear statements on the experimental design used in all in vivo studies described. Guidance is given in the report both when information was detected in your manuscript and when it was not. This will help you to maximise the quality of your descriptions of experiments and results. More examples of transparent reporting can be found on the ARRIVE guidelines webpages for individual items and sub-items.
In the current literature there are not enough examples of good reporting for some ARRIVE items to enable the tool to be trained, such as reporting effect sizes and confidence intervals (ARRIVE item 10b). Future updates to the tool will aim to expand coverage to enable quick and efficient assessment of ARRIVE compliance for more ARRIVE guidelines items.
If you uploaded a PDF, the extracted text might not have included the relevant information (we recommend you check text extracted from PDFs before submitting to the ARRIVE compliance checker). The tool may also miss information if phrasing is unusual or if the information is only in tables, figures or figure legends.
If you have copied and pasted text from your manuscript, try rewording using explicit terminology (e.g. the experimental unit was...) and visit the examples pages for the relevant ARRIVE item(s) for example statements from the published literature.
No. Only text from one manuscript at a time is supported at this time. For best results, each text submission should represent one animal experiment. Where multiple experiments are described in the text, you should check that reporting is comprehensive for all experiments.
Plain text is text including letters, numbers and punctuation but no formatting (such as bold, italics, colours or specific fonts). Plain text includes some 'invisible' characters that define how the text is arranged (such as space, line breaks and tabulation characters).
The ARRIVE compliance checker can only process plain text. If you submit text that is a combination of plain and non-plain text the compliance checker will not process the non-plain text and the report may not be as accurate. If you submit text that does not contain any plain text a report will not be generated.
In most programs or documents you can select text and copy it (for example using the keyboard shortcut CTRL + C on a Windows device or CMD + C on a Mac) and then paste it into the text upload box in the ARRIVE compliance checker using right click and selecting ‘Paste as plain text’ or by using keyboard shortcuts (for example CTRL + SHIFT + V on a Windows device or OPTION + SHIFT + CMD + V on a Mac).
Alternatively, you can copy text from your document and paste it into a plain text document (such pasting into a document in ‘Notepad’ on a Windows device or ‘TextEdit’ on a Mac and using Choose Format > Make Plain Text), this strips out the formatting. The text can then be simply copied and pasted from the text document into the ARRIVE compliance checker text upload box.
Different journals build PDFs in different ways and sometimes the PDF extractor will extract the beginning of a new column of text before it extracts all of the text from the previous column. The ARRIVE compliance checker does not need the information to be in an order logical to a human reader to be able to check for ARRIVE information, so this is unlikely to affect the results of the compliance check. If text is extracted with a break in the text in the middle of a key phrase that the tool is looking for, this could mean the tool does not detect that the item was reported.
If you uploaded a PDF, the PDF extractor may not have recognised the symbols. Different journals build PDFs in different ways and the code in the PDF representing symbols differs between the different types of PDF. The PDF extractor will sometimes leave a blank space where it does not recognise a symbol or might replace symbols with a letter or number (e.g. a beta could be replaced by the letter b). Symbols can include Greek letters and mathematical symbols.
The ARRIVE compliance checker tool cannot process symbols, this means they will not be present in the report.
Email us at arrive@nc3rs.org.uk for further assistance.
Feedback welcome
This is a beta version of the ARRIVE compliance checker. We welcome any feedback to help us improve the tool. If you have suggestions or encounter issues, please get in touch at arrive@nc3rs.org.uk.