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posted by janrinok on Friday August 26 2016, @08:13AM   Printer-friendly
from the not-so-bright-scientists dept.

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?


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 26 2016, @07:11PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 26 2016, @07:11PM (#393639)

    I don't blame the users when these kind of helpful features pop up unnanounced. This automatic data formatting has been a bane of mine as well, and it is something that gets foisted upon the user and get enabled by default. You also have to catch the error, which isn't always obvious when think that it is reasonable that before, when you entered your data, the cell ended up holding the data you typed, but now it works differently. Where I got bit in the ass with this was when entering dates, it was helping me out by reformatting it for me by assuming I wanted DD/MM/YY when I was typing in MM/DD/YY. I'm very sympathetic to users. Sure, you can go in and change this default behavior, once you found out about it, but what about the other helpful features that are enabled by default that you haven't discovered yet? The default on these programs is "do exactly what I tell you, not do what you think I mean" and let the user decide which features to enable.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 26 2016, @07:14PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 26 2016, @07:14PM (#393640)

    I meant the default should be do as I want. Left that part out in haste.