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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: 1) by kurenai.tsubasa on Friday August 26 2016, @03:23PM
Did like the dept line :)
I would heap the blame on the march towards “user friendliness.” User friendly is in the eyes of the user. It turns out that Excel really isn't that user friendly. Except if it came out of the box in a way that scientists and others who need to work with data in a rigorous manner may find more user friendly, legions of PHBs and accountants would blot out the sun with their irritated, angry helpdesk requests. “Why doesn't this stupid thing see that SEPT2 is when the next pay period is over?! What kind of autistic dweeb wrote this?!”
One would hope that the Everybody Can Code! thing would educate people the Excel isn't the only way and often isn't the best way to work with and present data, but one would hope for too much.
I think a lot of it is mostly starts from the irrational fear of the command line. I'm certain Google, Microsoft, Apple et al do have a vested interest in the idea that it's all magick powered by waldos under the hood. (Sure, one could argue a command prompt still doesn't constitute “under the hood,” since it isn't really.) code.org doesn't really do anything to dispel that notion afaict, but I digress.