At present, systematic reviews of animal experimental studies has become a new trend and an important way to synthesize the results of animal experimental studies, improve the conducting and reporting quality of animal experimental studies and provide references for the furture clinical research. However, there are many problems in the design and implementation process of published systematic reviews of animal experimental studies. Therefore, it is important to design a scientific and standard practical process to improve the quality of systematic reviews of animal experimental studies. In this paper, we developed a standard process for systematic reviews of animal experimental studies, in order to improve the quality of systematic reviews of animal experimental studies.
ObjectiveTo evaluate the methodological quality of animal experiments published in high impact journals, in order to provide references for improving the quality of animal experiments.MethodsCSCD and Web of Science databases were electronically searched to collect intervening primordial animal experiments from 2014 to August, 2016. Four reviewers independently screened literatures, extracted data and assessed the methodological quality of included studies by using SYRCLE tool.ResultsA total of 1 999 animal experiments were included. The cited frequency of more than 90% studies were ≤5 times, and of which 52.53% studies were zero. The results of SYRCLE evaluation showed that 54.55% of sub items rated as "low risk" were less than 30%. And 84.62% of them were less than 10%.ConclusionThere are defeet in methodological quality of animal experiments either domestic or abroad. The problems of domestic researches in implementation bias, measurement bias and loss of access bias are particularly obvious. The coincidence rates of "low risk" are much lower than those of abroad studies. Therefore, we suggest that it is necessary to take specific measures to popularize SYRCLE tool to effectively guide the development of animal experiments and improve the design and implementation of animal experiments.