Bob Mesibov (who has been a guest author on this blog) recently published a paper on data quality in in ZooKeys : In this paper Bob documents some significant discrepancies between data in his Millipedes of Australia (MoA) database and the equivalent data in the Atlas of Living Australia and GBIF (disclosure, I was a reviewer of the paper, and also sit on GBIF's science committee). This paper spawned a thread on TAXACOM, and also came

OMG. Playing with extracting identifiers from text, I have a regular expression for GenBank accession numbers that looks something like this: (A[A-Z])[0-9]{6} | (U[0-9]){5} | (D[A-Z])[0-9]{6} | (E[A-Z])[0-9]{6} | (NC_)[0-9]{6}). OK, it won't get everything, but what is more worrying are the things it will pickup that aren't GenBank accession numbers.