The ARRIVE guidelines apply to any manuscript describing in vivo animal research, including preprints posted on bioRxiv before peer review. bioRxiv’s screening staff do not run a full ARRIVE 2.0 compliance check, but they do flag manuscripts missing basic elements — an ethical approval statement, species and methods detail — that overlap heavily with the ARRIVE Essential 10, which is why incomplete reporting can delay or block posting even at preprint stage.
The ARRIVE guidelines on bioRxiv question comes up often among authors preparing animal-research manuscripts for rapid preprint dissemination, because bioRxiv’s screening step is frequently misunderstood as either a rubber stamp or a full editorial review. Neither is accurate. This article sets out what bioRxiv’s screening process actually covers, where it overlaps with ARRIVE 2.0, and what research administrators and authors should check before submission.
ARRIVE (Animal Research: Reporting of In Vivo Experiments) is a reporting checklist, first published in 2010 and revised as ARRIVE 2.0 in 2020, that specifies the minimum information a manuscript must contain for readers to assess the reliability and reproducibility of an animal study. It was developed by the UK’s National Centre for the Replacement, Refinement and Reduction of Animals in Research (NC3Rs).
Contents
- What are the ARRIVE guidelines and why do they matter for preprints?
- Do bioRxiv’s screening editors actually check for ARRIVE compliance?
- Which ARRIVE 2.0 items get flagged most often before posting?
- How should authors apply ARRIVE 2.0 before submitting to bioRxiv?
- Answer-first Q&A
- Implications for research administrators
What are the ARRIVE guidelines and why do they matter for preprints?
The ARRIVE guidelines organise reporting requirements into two tiers. The Essential 10 is the basic minimum — study design, sample size, inclusion/exclusion criteria, randomisation, blinding, outcome measures, statistical methods, experimental animals, experimental procedures, and results. The Recommended Set adds context: abstract, background, objectives, ethical statement, housing and husbandry, animal care and monitoring, interpretation, generalisability, protocol registration, data access, and declaration of interests.
Under the ARRIVE 2.0 framework published in PLOS Biology (Percie du Sert et al., 2020, DOI: 10.1371/journal.pbio.3000410), a manuscript that omits Essential 10 items cannot be properly evaluated for methodological rigour, regardless of whether it has been peer reviewed. That principle does not switch off because a manuscript is a preprint rather than a journal article — the underlying science, and the reader’s need to assess it, is identical.
Do bioRxiv’s screening editors actually check for ARRIVE compliance?
No — not as a formal checklist. bioRxiv’s screening, carried out by an in-house team supported by affiliate scientists, is a basic gate: is the submission within scope, is it plagiarised, does it pose a health or biosecurity risk, and does it meet bioRxiv’s own ethics-disclosure requirements. bioRxiv’s author guidelines require manuscripts describing animal research to include a statement identifying the institutional or licensing committee that approved the work.
That ethics-statement check is where ARRIVE and bioRxiv screening genuinely intersect. A missing or vague approval statement is one of the most common reasons a submission is queried before posting. According to bioRxiv’s own FAQ, preprints usually appear within 72 hours of submission, but screening “may take longer… if there are issues with the content that need addressing or extra scrutiny” — incomplete animal-research reporting is a recurring cause of that extra scrutiny.
Which ARRIVE 2.0 items get flagged most often before posting?
Screening staff are working scientists reading for scientific plausibility, not conducting a line-by-line ARRIVE audit. In practice, the items most likely to trigger a query sit at the intersection of ethics disclosure and basic method reporting:
- Ethical statement — missing approving body, licence number, or jurisdiction.
- Experimental animals — species, strain, sex, or age omitted entirely.
- Sample size — no stated number of animals per group or justification.
- Experimental procedures — insufficient detail to identify what was actually done to the animals.
The table below separates what bioRxiv screening checks from what full ARRIVE 2.0 compliance — normally enforced later, at journal peer review — requires.
| Reporting element | Checked at bioRxiv screening | Required for full ARRIVE 2.0 compliance |
|---|---|---|
| Ethical/licensing approval statement | Yes | Yes |
| Species, strain, sex reported | Partially (if glaringly absent) | Yes |
| Randomisation and blinding described | No | Yes |
| Sample size justification | No | Yes |
| Statistical methods specified | No | Yes |
| Plagiarism and scope check | Yes | Not applicable |
How should authors apply ARRIVE 2.0 before submitting to bioRxiv?
Authors should treat the ARRIVE Essential 10 as a pre-submission checklist, not a post-review fix. Completing it before posting reduces two risks: a bioRxiv screening query that delays the 72-hour posting window, and a costly rewrite when a journal later requires the same information for peer review.
Many journals, including those following ICMJE and COPE conventions, now require a completed ARRIVE 2.0 checklist at submission for animal studies. Because the EQUATOR Network lists ARRIVE among its core reporting guidelines for study design, journals increasingly expect it to have been applied from first draft, not retrofitted after review comments arrive.
Practical steps before uploading to bioRxiv:
- Draft the ethical statement first, naming the approving institutional or licensing committee explicitly.
- Work through the Essential 10 in the manuscript’s methods and results sections, not as an appendix.
- State group sizes and any exclusions, even preliminary ones, rather than leaving them for revision.
- Cross-check species, strain, sex and age reporting against the ARRIVE Essential 10 item for experimental animals.
Answer-first Q&A
What are ARRIVE guidelines?
The ARRIVE guidelines are a checklist of recommendations for reporting animal research, originally developed by NC3Rs in 2010 and updated as ARRIVE 2.0 in 2020. They cover study design, sample size, procedures and statistical methods so that readers and reviewers can assess whether findings are reliable and reproducible.
What is the ARRIVE Recommended Set?
The Recommended Set is the second tier of ARRIVE 2.0, complementing the Essential 10 with contextual items: abstract, background, ethical statement, housing and husbandry, animal care, interpretation and generalisability. Reporting both sets together represents documented best practice for animal-research manuscripts.
Why does bioRxiv screening sometimes take longer than expected?
bioRxiv states that preprints usually appear within 72 hours, but screening can extend beyond that window over weekends, holidays, or when content raises questions needing extra scrutiny — commonly missing ethics statements or unclear animal-research methodology that overlaps with ARRIVE reporting expectations.
Does a bioRxiv preprint count as published?
A bioRxiv preprint is a public, citable manuscript with a DOI, but it has not undergone formal peer review. Funders including the NIH permit citing preprints in grant reports, yet most journals still treat bioRxiv posting as prior dissemination rather than publication in the traditional sense.
Implications for research administrators
Institutional research administration offices supporting animal-research groups have a practical stake in this distinction. Because bioRxiv’s screening does not substitute for ARRIVE compliance, an institution that only checks for IACUC/ethics approval at the grant stage — and assumes preprint posting confirms adequate reporting — is leaving a compliance gap that surfaces later, at journal peer review, when revisions cost time and can delay the record of priority a preprint was meant to establish.
Building an ARRIVE 2.0 check into pre-submission workflows, alongside existing ethics-approval sign-off, closes that gap before it reaches a screening editor or a journal reviewer. This sits within the broader remit of research administration functions that manage compliance across the research lifecycle, not only at the funding-application stage.
Preprint reporting quality also feeds directly into reproducibility metrics that funders and institutions increasingly track. Treating ARRIVE 2.0 as a preprint-stage requirement, not a peer-review afterthought, is the more defensible position as scrutiny of preprint quality grows across the biosciences.