Excel Software Responsible for 20% of Errors in Genetics Research Papers

Excel is responsible for twenty percent of the errors in scientific papers related to genetics. A recent article published in the scientific journal Genome Biology attributes the default formatting of Excel (a Microsoft Office program) to about twenty percent of the errors found in scientific papers in genetics. Researchers have discovered that these errors arise because Excel's auto-correct feature converts common gene names into dates or numbers. Since there is no way to turn off this option in Excel, scientists must manually correct these automatic errors; a task that many forget, resulting in papers being published with the same uncorrected errors. An Australian group that examined errors in Excel sheets of genetic papers states that if Excel is used for processing genetic data in its original and automatic format, gene names will be changed to dates and numbers. This research group analyzed over thirty-five thousand Excel sheets belonging to more than three thousand five hundred published scientific papers in 19 different journals between 2005 and 2015 in the field of genetics and concluded that nearly one-fifth of all papers that used Excel contain errors. According to the Washington Post, if a researcher enters the gene name MARCH1 into Excel and hits Enter, Excel automatically changes this name to the date March 1 or 1-MAR. If the researcher realizes this mistake and hits Undo, the original name does not return; instead, Excel replaces it with the number 42430, which corresponds to that date in Excel's internal programming. To completely avoid such errors, each Excel column must be formatted separately; a task that can be very time-consuming given the large amounts of data in genetic articles and research. Members of this research group hope that their article will raise awareness among researchers about these computer and software errors, as the entire work of a scientific team can be undermined by a software error.