[LTER-im] Nice example of the perils of Excel for scientific work

[Hap Garritt]

HI all, 

I am surprised that the submitting authors never checked the accuracy of submitted data for gene name errors and other QA/QC checks. Excel is known to have date errors also between Mac and PC versions. Manuscript reviewers should also be aware of Excel issues. Perhaps the journals should request ascii text files only which would still need to be checked if Excel is converted to ascii. 

Hap 


----- Original Message -----

From: "Wade Sheldon" <sheldon at uga.edu> 
To: "LTER IM" <im at lternet.edu> 
Sent: Wednesday, August 24, 2016 8:14:52 AM 
Subject: [LTER-im] Nice example of the perils of Excel for scientific work 

Hi folks, 

In case anyone needs yet another example to get investigators and students to be wary of Excel for working up their data, here you go: 

Ziemann, M., Eren, Y. and El-Osta, A. 2016. Gene name errors are widespread in the scientific literature. Genome Biology, 17:177. 
(http://genomebiology.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s13059-016-1044-7) 

Abstract: 
The spreadsheet software Microsoft Excel, when used with default settings, is known to convert gene names to dates and floating-point numbers. A programmatic scan of leading genomics journals reveals that approximately one-fifth of papers with supplementary Excel gene lists contain erroneous gene name conversions. 


Wade Sheldon 
GCE-LTER 
_______________________________________________ 
Long Term Ecological Research Network 
im mailing list 
im at lternet.edu 




-- 
Hap Garritt 
Plum Island Ecosystems (PIE) LTER 
Marine Biological Lab, Ecosystems Center 
7 MBL Street 
Woods Hole, MA 02543 
508-289-7485 
hgarritt at mbl.edu 
http://ecosystems.mbl.edu 
http://pie-lter.ecosystems.mbl.edu 

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