Unpronounceable — why can’t people give bioinformatics tools sensible names? by Keith Bardnam.
From the post:
Okay, so many of you know that I have a bit of an issue with bioinformatics tools with names that are formed from very tenuous acronyms or initialisms. I’ve handed out many JABBA awards for cases of ‘Just Another Bogus Bioinformatics Acronym’. But now there is another blight on the landscape of bioinformatics nomenclature…that of unpronounceable names.
If you develop bioinformatics tools, you would hopefully want to promote those tools to others. This could be in a formal publication, or at a conference presentation, or even over a cup of coffee with a colleague. In all of these situations, you would hope that the name of your bioinformatics tool should be memorable. One way of making it memorable is to make it pronounceable. Surely, that’s not asking that much? And yet…
…
The examples Keith recites are quite amusing and you can find more at the JABBA awards.
He also includes some helpful advice on naming:
There is a lot of bioinformatics software in this world. If you choose to add to this ever growing software catalog, then it will be in your interest to make your software easy to discover and easy to promote. For your own sake, and for the sake of any potential users of your software, I strongly urge you to ask yourself the following five questions:
- Is the name memorable?
- Does the name have one obvious pronunciation?
- Could I easily spell the name out to a journalist over the phone?
- Is the name of my database tool free from any needless mixed capitalization?
- Have I considered whether my software name is based on such a tenuous acronym or intialism that it will probably end up receiving a JABBA award?
To which I would add:
6. Have you searched the name in popular Internet search engines?
I read a fair amount of computer news and little is more annoying that to search for new “name” only to find it has 10 million “hits.” Any relevant to the new usage are buried somewhere in the long set of results.
Two word names do better and three even better than two. That is if you want people to find your project, paper, software.
If not, then by all means use one of the most popular child name lists. You will know where to find your work, but the rest of us won’t.