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I think you really hit on the crux of the problem here. The training needed to even put together a genetics paper, much less published and read by others in the

I think you really hit on the crux of the problem here. The training needed to even put together a genetics paper, much less published and read by others in the field, is /easily/ 7 years of graduate work—NONE of which is spent learning to code! There ARE better tools, but the incentives aren’t aligned for genomics researchers to learn them. Which is why bioinformatics is such a great field! Biologists are aware of the problem, and better late than never...if you’re interested in being part of the solution to this problem, there has never been a better time to get started!

mbreese 8y ago
It's not that incentives aren't aligned for people to start using better tools, it's that Excel is largely good enough. So we all deal with stupid Excel hashing of specific genes (because we all know which genes are this issue by this point). This isn't exactly a new phenomenon. When I was in grad school (early 2000s), using Excel for gene names was already a well known issue. Some researchers are never going to use anything other than Excel for this even when people like me harp on them to stop treating Excel as a database. It's "good-enough", so it gets used more often than it should.