Gene name errors are widespread in the scientific literature (2016)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18165218 was 11 months ago, making this one a dupe (see https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html).

Also discussed in 2016: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12349391

This is a drag on international productivity. I see this all the time with Excel sheets made with data from various business processes (invoice numbers, ID strings, etc.). I can’t believe Excel doesn’t have a switch for “please don’t maim my data” in 2019, but I can’t find it.

[2016]

Actually, I remember discussing this with colleagues back in 2006.

Also, the Hugo Gene Nomenclature Committee have been quietly going around changing some of the worst offending gene names.

Ooo not good because researchers are using doing site wide paper scans and NLP with genes as major keywords

Allele misassignment is another rampant issue. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18154681?dopt=Abstract