Classifying the severity of scientific animal use: a review of international systems
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Severity classification systems (ie pain scales, categories of invasiveness, degrees of severity etc) are used to classify the adverse effects experienced by animals used for scientific purposes. Currently, eleven countries use severity classification systems. These systems have developed in various ways, depending on each country's process for overseeing the use of animals in science, as well as the particular aspects emphasised by those individuals who have championed their implementation. Severity classification serves four main purposes: as a tool to assist animal ethics committees in ethical review; education of animal users about concepts for humane animal experimentation; provision of data to inform the public about scientific animal use; and provision of data to inform national policies. At a time when the newly accepted European Union Directive will make the reporting of severity data mandatory, we review the characteristics of international severity classification systems and how they have evolved; analyse the effectiveness of some systems; and identify emerging challenges for severity classification.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.016 | 0.025 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.004 | 0.002 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.014 | 0.017 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".