Two new articles have highlighted potential problems of standards and reproducibility in preclinical research (particularly in relation to elimination of bias).

The first paper, published in Plos Biology, examined preclinical experiments and found that scientists were rarely using techniques to cut down on bias, such as randomising which animals are assigned to different groups, or blinding themselves to this division.

The second new paper, published in eLIFE, suggested that researcher bias may produce a considerable overestimate of the preclinical effectiveness of therapeutics (in this case, the article examined a treatment used for oncology).

Further commentary on these studies can be found here and here.