I’m not going to describe painful process of correcting entries in biological databases or errors in publications when one is not the author – we all know how difficult and unrewarding it is. All major databases contain wrong entries – I see misannotated (or nonexistent) genes in Genbank, artificial domains in PFAM or poorly solved structures in PDB. It’s even worse in publications, where across the whole spectrum of journals I see errors which in theory shouldn’t slip through peer review (this includes such prominent publishers like NPG).
One of the best idea I heard that addressed this issue was to build a bug tracking system (I would like to give credit to the author, but I cannot find the source; wasn’t that one of biobloggers?). It’s simple and efficient. Something is wrong? Fill a bug report. It would be linking to the original entry, would be available for aggregation (for example to track report’s author activity), and possibly could be closed by somebody else than database maintainers or authors if it’s wrong. Because it would be external to all databases, maybe it could grow to provide “community corrected” versions of these databases?
What do you think? How useful such system could be?
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Freelancing science 
Bug tracking systems in science
I’m not going to describe painful process of correcting entries in biological databases or errors in publications when one is not the author – we all know how difficult and unrewarding it is. All major databases contain wrong entries – I see misannotated (or nonexistent) genes in Genbank, artificial domains in PFAM or poorly solved structures in PDB. It’s even worse in publications, where across the whole spectrum of journals I see errors which in theory shouldn’t slip through peer review (this includes such prominent publishers like NPG).
One of the best idea I heard that addressed this issue was to build a bug tracking system (I would like to give credit to the author, but I cannot find the source; wasn’t that one of biobloggers?). It’s simple and efficient. Something is wrong? Fill a bug report. It would be linking to the original entry, would be available for aggregation (for example to track report’s author activity), and possibly could be closed by somebody else than database maintainers or authors if it’s wrong. Because it would be external to all databases, maybe it could grow to provide “community corrected” versions of these databases?
What do you think? How useful such system could be?
Posted by Pawel Szczesny on April 18, 2008 in Comments, Community, Software
Tags: bioinformatics, bug tracking, NPG, science