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1. Pain and Laboratory Animals: Publication Practices for Better Data Reproducibility and Better Animal Welfare

   https://doi.org/10.1371/journal. pone.0155001  

   Larry Carbone, Jamie Austin ( May 2016 , PloS one)

   Scientists who perform major survival surgery on laboratory animals face a dual welfare and methodological challenge: how to choose surgical anesthetics and post-operative analgesics that will best control animal suffering, knowing that both pain and the drugs that manage pain can all affect research outcomes. Scientists who publish full descriptions of animal procedures allow critical and systematic reviews of data, demonstrate their adherence to animal welfare norms, and guide other scientists on how to conduct their own studies in the field. We investigated what information on animal pain management a reasonably diligent scientist might find in planning for a successful experiment. To explore how scientists in a range of fields describe their management of this ethical and methodological concern, we scored 400 scientific articles that included major animal survival surgeries as part of their experimental methods, for the completeness of information on anesthesia and analgesia. The 400 articles (250 accepted for publication pre-2011, and 150 in 2014–15, along with 174 articles they reference) included thoracotomies, craniotomies, gonadectomies, organ transplants, peripheral nerve injuries, spinal laminectomies and orthopedic procedures in dogs, primates, swine, mice, rats and other rodents. We scored articles for Publication Completeness (PC), which was any mention of use of anesthetics or analgesics; Analgesia Use (AU) which was any use of post-surgical analgesics, and Analgesia Completeness (a composite score comprising intra-operative analgesia, extended post-surgical analgesia, and use of multimodal analgesia). 338 of 400 articles were PC. 98 of these 338 were AU, with some mention of analgesia, while 240 of 338 mentioned anesthesia only but not postsurgical analgesia. Journals’ caliber, as measured by their 2013 Impact Factor, had no effect on PC or AU. We found no effect of whether a journal instructs authors to consult the ARRIVE publishing guidelines published in 2010 on PC or AC for the 150 mouse and rat articles in our 2014–15 dataset. None of the 302 articles that were silent about analgesic use included an explicit statement that analgesics were withheld, or a discussion of how pain management or untreated pain might affect results. We conclude that current scientific literature cannot be trusted to present full detail on use of animal anesthetics and analgesics. We report that publication guidelines focus more on other potential sources of bias in experimental results, under-appreciate the potential for pain and pain drugs to skew data, PLOS ONE | DOI:10.1371/journal.pone.0155001 May 12, 2016 1 / 24 a11111 OPEN ACCESS Citation: Carbone L, Austin J (2016) Pain and Laboratory Animals: Publication Practices for Better Data Reproducibility and Better Animal Welfare. PLoS ONE 11(5): e0155001. doi:10.1371/journal. pone.0155001 Editor: Chang-Qing Gao, Central South University, CHINA Received: December 29, 2015 Accepted: April 22, 2016 Published: May 12, 2016 Copyright: © 2016 Carbone, Austin. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. Data Availability Statement: All relevant data are within the paper and its Supporting Information files. Authors may be contacted for further information. Funding: This study was funded by the United States National Science Foundation Division of Social and Economic Sciences. Award #1455838. The funder had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript. Competing Interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist. and thus mostly treat pain management as solely an animal welfare concern, in the jurisdiction of animal care and use committees. At the same time, animal welfare regulations do not include guidance on publishing animal data, even though publication is an integral part of the cycle of research and can affect the welfare of animals in studies building on published work, leaving it to journals and authors to voluntarily decide what details of animal use to publish. We suggest that journals, scientists and animal welfare regulators should revise current guidelines and regulations, on treatment of pain and on transparent reporting of treatment of pain, to improve this dual welfare and data-quality deficiency. 

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2. A Unified Welfare Analysis of Government Policies*

   https://doi.org/10.1093/qje/qjaa006  

   Hendren, Nathaniel ; Sprung-Keyser, Ben ( March 2020 , The Quarterly Journal of Economics)

   null (Ed.)

   Abstract We conduct a comparative welfare analysis of 133 historical policy changes over the past half-century in the United States, focusing on policies in social insurance, education and job training, taxes and cash transfers, and in-kind transfers. For each policy, we use existing causal estimates to calculate the benefit that each policy provides its recipients (measured as their willingness to pay) and the policy’s net cost, inclusive of long-term effects on the government’s budget. We divide the willingness to pay by the net cost to the government to form each policy’s Marginal Value of Public Funds, or its ``MVPF''. Comparing MVPFs across policies provides a unified method of assessing their effect on social welfare. Our results suggest that direct investments in low-income children’s health and education have historically had the highest MVPFs, on average exceeding 5. Many such policies have paid for themselves as the government recouped the cost of their initial expenditures through additional taxes collected and reduced transfers. We find large MVPFs for education and health policies among children of all ages, rather than observing diminishing marginal returns throughout childhood. We find smaller MVPFs for policies targeting adults, generally between 0.5 and 2. Expenditures on adults have exceeded this MVPF range in particular if they induced large spillovers on children. We relate our estimates to existing theories of optimal government policy, and we discuss how the MVPF provides lessons for the design of future research. 

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3. Is genomic diversity a useful proxy for census population size? Evidence from a species‐rich community of desert lizards

   https://doi.org/10.1111/mec.15042  

   Grundler, Maggie R. ; Singhal, Sonal ; Cowan, Mark A. ; Rabosky, Daniel L. ( April 2019 , Molecular Ecology)

   Species abundance data are critical for testing ecological theory, but obtaining accurate empirical estimates for many taxa is challenging. Proxies for species abundance can help researchers circumvent time and cost constraints that are prohibitive for long‐term sampling. Under simple demographic models, genetic diversity is expected to correlate with census size, such that genome‐wide heterozygosity may provide a surrogate measure of species abundance. We tested whether nucleotide diversity is correlated with long‐term estimates of abundance, occupancy and degree of ecological specialization in a diverse lizard community from arid Australia. Using targeted sequence capture, we obtained estimates of genomic diversity from 30 species of lizards, recovering an average of 5,066 loci covering 3.6 Mb of DNA sequence per individual. We compared measures of individual heterozygosity to a metric of habitat specialization to investigate whether ecological preference exerts a measurable effect on genetic diversity. We find that heterozygosity is significantly correlated with species abundance and occupancy, but not habitat specialization. Demonstrating the power of genomic sampling, the correlation between heterozygosity and abundance/occupancy emerged from considering just one or two individuals per species. However, genetic diversity does no better at predicting abundance than a single day of traditional sampling in this community. We conclude that genetic diversity is a useful proxy for regional‐scale species abundance and occupancy, but a large amount of unexplained variation in heterozygosity suggests additional constraints or a failure of ecological sampling to adequately capture variation in true population size.

    

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4. Greater stem growth, woody allocation, and aboveground biomass in Paleotropical forests than in Neotropical forests

   https://doi.org/10.1002/ecy.2589  

   Taylor, Philip G. ; Cleveland, Cory C. ; Soper, Fiona ; Wieder, William R. ; Dobrowski, Solomon Z. ; Doughty, Christopher E. ; Townsend, Alan R. ( February 2019 , Ecology)

   Forest dynamics and tree species composition vary substantially between Paleotropical and Neotropical forests, but these broad biogeographic regions are treated uniformly in many land models. To assess whether these regional differences translate into variation in productivity and carbon (C) storage, we compiled a database of climate, tree stem growth, litterfall, aboveground net primary production (ANPP), and aboveground biomass across tropical rainforest sites spanning 33 countries throughout Central and South America, Asia, and Australasia, but excluding Africa due to a paucity of available data. Though thesumof litterfall and stem growth (ANPP) did not differ between regions, both stem growth and theratioof stem growth to litterfall were higher in Paleotropical forests compared to Neotropical forests across the full observed range of ANPP. Greater C allocation to woody growth likely explains the much larger aboveground biomass estimates in Paleotropical forests (~29%, or ~80 Mg DW/ha, greater than in the Neotropics). Climate was similar in Paleo‐ and Neotropical forests, thus the observed differences in C likely reflect differences in the evolutionary history of species and forest structure and function between regions. Our analysis suggests that Paleotropical forests, which can be dominated by tall‐statured Dipterocarpaceae species, may be disproportionate hotspots for aboveground C storage. Land models typically treat these distinct tropical forests with differential structures as a single functional unit, but our findings suggest that this may overlook critical biogeographic variation in C storage potential among regions.

    

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5. Incentivizing Truthfulness Through Audits in Strategic Classification

   Estornell, Andrew ; Das, Sanmay ; Vorobeychik, Yevgeniy ( January 2021 , Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence)

   null (Ed.)

   In many societal resource allocation domains, machine learn- ing methods are increasingly used to either score or rank agents in order to decide which ones should receive either resources (e.g., homeless services) or scrutiny (e.g., child welfare investigations) from social services agencies. An agency’s scoring function typically operates on a feature vector that contains a combination of self-reported features and information available to the agency about individuals or households. This can create incentives for agents to misrepresent their self-reported features in order to receive resources or avoid scrutiny, but agencies may be able to selectively au- dit agents to verify the veracity of their reports. We study the problem of optimal auditing of agents in such settings. When decisions are made using a threshold on an agent’s score, the optimal audit policy has a surprisingly simple structure, uniformly auditing all agents who could benefit from lying. While this policy can, in general be hard to compute because of the difficulty of identifying the set of agents who could benefit from lying given a complete set of reported types, we also present necessary and sufficient conditions under which it is tractable. We show that the scarce resource setting is more difficult, and exhibit an approximately optimal audit policy in this case. In addition, we show that in either setting verifying whether it is possible to incentivize exact truthfulness is hard even to approximate. However, we also exhibit sufficient conditions for solving this problem optimally, and for obtaining good approximations. 

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