Poor Reporting Quality in Basic Nutrition Research: A Case Study Based on a Scoping Review of Recent Folate Research in Mouse Models (2009–2021)
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Transparent reporting of nutrition research promotes rigor, reproducibility, and relevance to human nutrition. We performed a scoping review of recent articles reporting dietary folate interventions in mice as a case study to determine the reporting frequency of generic study design items (i.e., sex, strain, and age) and nutrition-specific items (i.e., base diet composition, intervention doses, duration, and exposure verification) in basic nutrition research. We identified 798 original research articles in the EMBASE, Medline, Food Science and Technology Abstracts (FSTA), Global Health, and International Pharmaceutical Abstracts (IPA) databases published between January 2009 and July 2021 in which a dietary folic acid (FA) intervention was used in mice. We identified 312 original peer-reviewed articles including 191 studies in nonpregnant and 126 in pregnant mice. Most studies reported sex (99%), strain (99%), and age (83%). The majority of studies used C57BL/6 (53%) or BALB/c (11%) mice aged 3-9 wk. Nonpregnancy studies were more likely to use only male mice (57%). Dietary FA interventions varied considerably and overlapped: deficiency (0-3 mg/kg), control (0-16 mg/kg), and supplemented (0-50 mg/kg). Only 63% of studies used an open-formula base diet with a declared FA content and 60% of studies verified FA exposure using folate status biomarkers. The duration of intervention ranged from 1 to 104 wk for nonpregnancy studies. The duration of intervention for pregnancy studies was 1-19 wk, occurring variably before pregnancy and/or during pregnancy and/or lactation. Overall, 17% of studies did not report ≥1 generic study design item(s) and 40% did not report ≥1 nutrition-specific study design item(s). The variability and frequent lack of reporting of important generic and nutrition-specific study design details in nutrition studies limit their generalizability, reproducibility, and interpretation. The use of reporting checklists for animal research would enhance reporting quality of key study design and conduct factors in animal-based nutrition research.
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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 | 0.130 | 0.239 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.010 | 0.017 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
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".