A lesson in “reading before you tweet”

So, I read the title:

Mining locus tags in PubMed Central to improve microbial gene annotation

and skimmed the abstract:

The scientific literature contains millions of microbial gene identifiers within the full text and tables, but these annotations rarely get incorporated into public sequence databases.

and thought, well OK, but wouldn’t it be better to incorporate annotations in the first place – when submitting to the public databases – rather than by this indirect method?

You could annotate genomes like this. Or databases could enforce standards in the first place. http://t.co/XandKCU1lt

— Neil Saunders (@neilfws) February 5, 2014

The point, of course, is to incorporate new findings from the literature into existing records, rather than to use the tool as a primary method of annotation. I do believe that public databases could do more to enforce data quality standards at deposition time, but that’s an entirely separate issue.

Big thanks to Michael Hoffman for a spirited Twitter discussion that put me straight.