Collaborative Print Design Tool 2017

The Experimental Design Assistant - EDA

Overview
Publications

The Experimental Design Assistant (EDA) is a free online tool from the NC3Rs, designed to guide researchers through the design of their experiments, helping to ensure that they use the minimum number of animals consistent with their scientific objectives, methods to reduce subjective bias, and appropriate statistical analysis.

Click here to access the EDA

What is the EDA?
System requirements for the EDA
Background to the EDA
How does the EDA further the implementation of the 3Rs?
Working group membership

What is the EDA?

The EDA comprises of two parts: a web application and a supporting website; benefits include:

The ability to build a stepwise visual representation of your experiment.
Feedback and advice on your experimental plan.
Dedicated support for randomisation, blinding and sample size calculation.
Practical information to improve knowledge of experimental design.
Improved transparency of your experimental design, allowing you to share and discuss your plan with colleagues and collaborators.

To use the system you need to create a free account through the EDA website so that you can save your diagrams and work on them over time.

System requirements

We recommend using the EDA with the latest stable release of Chrome. Alternatively, the latest stable release of Mozilla Firefox or Safari can also be used.

The EDA is not currently compatible with mobiles and tablets. We intend to support IE11 and Edge in later releases.Please note that the EDA will not load in Internet Explorer browsers prior to IE11.

Using the EDA in an unsupported or out-of-date browser may result in:

being unable to access the EDA
loss of functionality of EDA features
display issues while using the designer

Background to the Experimental Design Assistant

From the blog: Improving the design of animal experiments: Introducing the Experimental Design Assistant (EDA).

In 2009, we published a survey of the peer-reviewed literature which assessed the quality of publicly funded animal research in the US and the UK. The survey identified areas for improvement in:

Experimental design
Statistical analysis
Reporting of studies

In response to the survey, we produced guidelines for the reporting of animal experiments – the ARRIVE guidelines, which were published in 2010 and subsequently endorsed by many journals, research funders, universities and learned societies.

To build on this work and provide further support to improve the quality of animal experiments, we developed the EDA which was launched in 2015. The EDA is developed in collaboration with an expert working group and Certus Technology, a company which specialises in innovative software for the life sciences.

How does the EDA further the implementation of the 3Rs?

Good experimental design can minimise animal use in two ways:

By accounting for the influence of variables and addressing sources of bias, an adequately designed experiment will yield robust and reproducible data, ensuring that the data from every animal is utilised to its full potential.
An efficient use of statistics can reduce the number of animals required and maximise the information obtained per experiment. More complex designs, for example, can help researchers identify factors which influence the experimental results, providing more information about the model they are using.

Working group membership

Professor Clare Stanford (Chair)	University College London
Dr Simon Bate	GlaxoSmithKline
Dr Manuel Berdoy	University of Oxford
Dr Robin Clark	Envigo
Professor Innes Cuthill	University of Bristol
Dr Derek Fry	University of Manchester
Dr Natasha Karp	AstraZeneca
Professor Malcolm Macleod	University of Edinburgh
Dr Lawrence Moon	King's College London
Dr Richard Preziosi	University of Manchester