Reporting quality of the literature on the pharmacological and psychological treatments of the alcohol-deprivation effect

Adequate reporting practices are essential to transparent and reproducible research. A lack
of adequate reporting could notably reflect methodological deficiencies, a rampant problem
in experimental and biological psychology. We assessed the reporting quality in the literature
on pharmacological and psychological treatments of alcohol-deprivation effect (ADE), a
popular behavioral animal model of alcohol relapse. A literature search on PubMed yielded
154 titles among which we extracted 68 articles meeting the inclusion criteria. We evaluated
these articles according the reporting guide ARRIVE 2.0 that comprises 54 items, each of
which being coded as properly reported or not. On a 55-point scale (including 0), the median
reporting score was 27 [IQR: 24; 29.25]. The articles reporting scores moderately increased
from 1993 to 2020, as suggested by a LOWESS regression generated from 100 000 bootstraps,
the R² being 0.158 [CI95%: 0.036; 0.316]. This trend was supported by the comparison, using
a two-sided Mann-Whitney U test, of the scores derived from the articles published before
2010 (first publication of ARRIVE) and those published after 2012, which resulted in a 9.61%
increase with a moderate effect size r of 0.34 [CI95: 0.11; 0.55]. Our results generalize the low
quality of reporting practices found in several fields of experimental and biological psychology
to the field of ADE. Although we found a measurable and encouraging increase in the quality
of reporting, there is still much room for improvement.