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Scientific literature often mis-names genes and boffins say Microsoft Excel is partly to blame.
"Automatic conversion of gene symbols to dates and floating-point numbers is a problematic feature of Excel software," In a paper titled write Mark Ziemann, Yotam Eren and Assam El-OstaEmai of the Baker IDI Heart & Diabetes Institute in Australia in a paper titled Gene name errors are widespread in the scientific literature .
Among the things Excel does to gene names include changing "SEPT2", the name of a gene thought to have a role in proper formation of cell structure, to the date "2-Sep". The "MARCH1" gene becomes "1-Mar".
The paper notes that this is a problem that's been know for over a decade, but one which remains pervasive. The trio studied 35,175 Excel tables attached to 3,597 scientific papers published between 2005 and 2015 and found errors in "987 supplementary files from 704 published articles. Of the selected journals, the proportion of published articles with Excel files containing gene lists that are affected by gene name errors is 19.6 per cent."
It's not hard to change the default format of Excel cell to avoid changes of this sort: you can get it done in a click or three. Much of the problem in these papers is therefore between scientists' ears, rather than within Excel itself. The paper's silent on why genetic scientists, who The Register will assume are not short of intelligence, have been making Excel errors for years.
This article focuses on errors resulting from auto-correction of gene names; certainly other subject areas have suffered from similarly 'helpful' software. What hilarious and/or cringe-worthy 'corrections' have YOU seen?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 26 2016, @09:42AM
They work fine for recording points in courses. I wouldn't consider that a toy application.
However I agree that in science work, they have no place.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 26 2016, @03:23PM
Spreadsheets are very useful for manually entering tables of data, and quickly displaying tables of data with colors and such, especially in situations where color-coding cells based upon their values provides valuable information. That stuff is quick to do, but is practically limited to a small amount of data that is easy to ingest by eye. However, doing anything more than just calculating sums, means, standard deviations, etc., it can be a very painful tool to use.
I cringe when I see Excel plots, particularly when the author hasn't taken the time to change the very ugly default layout. I've seen refereed papers that have ugly default Excel plots where the plot was reduced in size, but the axes labels stay the same resulting in a plot that is predominantly axis and labels at the expense of the plot region.