AUGUST is a consortium striving to facilitate the understanding of systematic reviews and meta-analysis in preclinical science, thereby improving the standards and insights in the field.

Systematic Reviews and meta-analysis are the cores of evidence-based medicine. They are a thorough analysis of earlier conducted and published experiments, synthesizing distinct knowledge into an accessible form. Although systematic reviews are well known from the clinical setting, the use of a systematic review and meta-analysis based on preclinical literature, facilitating translation to the clinical settings is infrequent. However, there is currently strong international focus on this issue, and debates on whether the infrequent number of Systematic Reviews and Meta-analyses could be part of the reason why translation to the clinical setting is often failing. The group behind the current seminar and workshop strongly believe that systematic reviews and meta-analyses on animal literature have several advantages: they can provide information to improve scientific quality; they can lead to improved implementation of the 3Rs principles, and furthermore they can increase the translational value of animal studies.

AUGUST was originally established following implementation of the Excellence in European Doctoral Training programme between Aarhus University and University of Edinburgh. Currently AUGUST actively collaborates with CAMARADES (University of Edinburgh, United Kingdom) and SYRCLE (Radboud Medical Centre, Netherlands)