Citations in Bioinformatics

if a bioinformatics paper is cited by a biologist, the tool helped sb
if a bioinformatics paper is cited by a bioinformatician, that means a new tool is going to replace an old one

by analyzing the citation pattern of a paper, we can estimate when a tool become popular, and which one is going to be out-of-date

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It is a note written on facebook on Friday, March 27, 2009 at 8:51am

What’s wrong with tab-delimited file?

I remember I was once heard the comment,

I don’t think there is anything wrong the tab-delimited files. I think the usual genetic data files, .map and .dat are fine.

after I said, as a geneticist, one should not need to care about what data format a tool is supporting and goes straight to browse the pedigree and do analysis with the genotyped SNPs data.

Clear enough, one would not have any idea to improve on existing tool if one feels comfortable with the current situation. Maybe, at best, one would develop a tool which takes up data with one set of file format and ‘help’ to generate the other one thousands. but is that really a solution?

and happy enough, Google didn’t even feel comfortable with email, and then they invent Google wave:

I think all bioinformaticians should not feel comfortable with any of the current tools, we are too young to feel satisfied.