Stories
Slash Boxes
Comments

SoylentNews is people

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?


Original Submission

 
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.
Display Options Threshold/Breakthrough Mark All as Read Mark All as Unread
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
  • (Score: 2) by janrinok on Saturday August 27 2016, @09:12AM

    by janrinok (52) Subscriber Badge on Saturday August 27 2016, @09:12AM (#393889) Journal

    I would hope that we try not to censor anyone - just browse at level 0 or 1 and such things just disappear because the community has already down-modded them. But, we can ban if we have to.

    I only have to reboot my router in a certain way and my ISP will allocate me a new IP - banning a specific IP is of limited value, and banning a block brings its own heap of problems. I'm sure that paulej72 will have a whole list of good reasons why we operate as we do, but that is not my part of ship, so to speak...

    Starting Score:    1  point
    Karma-Bonus Modifier   +1  

    Total Score:   2