ARRIVE 2.0: The Essential 10 and the Recommended Set for Reporting Animal Research

ARRIVE guidelines 2.0, from Percie du Sert and colleagues, set out 21 reporting items for in vivo animal research, split into the Essential 10 — the minimum any reporting of animal research should include — and a Recommended Set of a further 11 items that add important context and detail.

The Essential 10

The Essential 10, as published on arriveguidelines.org and in the accompanying PLOS Biology paper, comprises: study design, sample size, inclusion and exclusion criteria, randomisation, blinding (masking), outcome measures, statistical methods, experimental animals, experimental procedures, and results1. These ten items were identified as the minimum needed for a reader to judge whether a study's design and analysis support its conclusions — omitting any one of them makes the study difficult or impossible to assess properly, regardless of how well the remaining items are reported.

The Recommended Set

The Recommended Set adds a further eleven items: abstract, background, objectives, ethical statement, housing and husbandry, animal care and monitoring, interpretation and scientific implications, generalisability/translation, protocol registration, data access, and declarations of interest and funding. These items add important context — particularly for reproducibility and for readers trying to judge how far results might generalise — but the guideline's authors treat them as a second tier, to be adopted once the Essential 10 is reliably in place.

Rationale for the two-tier structure

The two-tier structure exists because long, flat checklists tend in practice to be only partially completed, and the original 2010 ARRIVE guidelines suffered from inconsistent uptake. By explicitly ranking the Essential 10 as non-negotiable and the Recommended Set as a further, additive standard, ARRIVE 2.0 gives authors and reviewers a clear minimum standard to check first, rather than treating all 21 items as equally optional components of a general aim of thoroughness.

Key points

Practical application

Frequently asked questions

@misc{arrive_2_0_animal_research_reporting_2026,
  author       = {{Pubrica Academy}},
  title        = {ARRIVE 2.0: The Essential 10 and the Recommended Set for Reporting Animal Research},
  howpublished = {Pubrica},
  year         = {2026},
  month        = {oct},
  url          = {https://pubrica.com/academy/concepts-definitions/arrive-2-0-animal-research-reporting/},
  note         = {Accessed: <span data-cite-acc="iso">2026-10-15</span>}
}

[ ] Study design
[ ] Sample size
[ ] Inclusion and exclusion criteria
[ ] Randomisation
[ ] Blinding (masking)
[ ] Outcome measures
[ ] Statistical methods
[ ] Experimental animals
[ ] Experimental procedures
[ ] Results