Just because your own definitions of "bioinformatics" or "computational biology" requires one be a programmer does not actually make it so. These fields are actually very broad encompassing all sorts of activities, skills and knowledge and crossing over into many related fields and disciplines. I would not be so restrictive in my views of how others see their professional roles, nor of how their working colleagues see them.

I just do not see things so restrictively. Bioinformatics to my mind is not a discipline in its own right anyway - it is merely a combinatorial term to describe a multidisciplinary area of expertise, only one potential facet of it which may be expertise in a programming language.

I know many who call themselves bioinformaticians, and yet their knowledge of statistics and data analyses and interpretation skills are sorely lacking. Someone who programs, and just happens to work on biological applications with no expertise in biology, are they really a bioinformatician?

Just because your own definitions of "bioinformatics" or "computational biology" requires one be a programmer does not actually make it so. These fields are actually very broad encompassing all sorts of activities, skills and knowledge and crossing over into many related fields and disciplines. I would not be so restrictive in my views of how others see their professional roles, nor of how their working colleagues see them.

I just do not see things so restrictively. Bioinformatics to my mind is not a discipline in its own right anyway - it is merely a combinatorial term to describe a multidisciplinary area of expertise, only one potential facet of it which may be expertise in a programming language.

I know many who call themselves bioinformaticians, and yet their knowledge of statistics and data analyses and interpretation skills are sorely lacking. Someone who programs, and just happens to work on biological applications with no expertise in biology, are they really a bioinformatician?

My opinion is different, but yes, I agree, I am too restrictive. I just wanted to say that being able to press the PCR start button does not mean I am a molecular biologist.

"Someone who programs, and just happens to work on biological applications with no expertise in biology, are they really a bioinformatician?", my answer is no, and yet you find a lot of jobs where they ask for a bioinformatician to maintain servers or databases...

Anyway, then there is no difference if you are an end user of bioinformatic tools developed by others and you don't understand what's going on inside that tool or if instead you would be able to open that tool and follow the instructions to your output? They are all bioinformaticians, no difference? Then if I can plug a cable in the right place I am an eIectrician. I would like to ask to people looking for a bioinformatician if it is ok for him/her to hire someone not able to program at all.

" I would like to ask to people looking for a bioinformatician if it is ok for him/her to hire someone not able to program at all."

In my experience, yes, this happens all the time. A job is advertised with the general heading of seeking a bioinformatician. The actual detailed job description then defines that the employer is actually looking for a systems admin (who will be then working with a bioinformatics group), or a statistician to work with programmers on implementing some specific analysis pipeline, or a data analyst to handle data in, say a sequencing facility, where other sys. admins and programmers are available to assist him or her in automating analysis and such. Or sometimes they want someone with the experience to oversee or supervise all those areas, maintain QC and contribute to the final interpretation and publication of results.

In most job advertisements, it seems to me that the term is used very loosely as employers may be seeking people from any one of several core disciples to work as part of, or with an integrated team of people who collectively oversea some bioinformatics center, department or core. Since the person is being hired in some capacity to work in a bioinformatics setting, group or core, that is used for the job placement heading.

Even when someone did learn to code in graduate school or early on and has a published and released their own code, they often end up being promoted into roles where those skills fall by the wayside, but there roles still fall generally under the term bioinformatics, or even computational biology. I guess I could say I fall into that camp - I basically get paid for my statistical and data analyses skills and my ability to interpret the biology of the results. But I have not coded anything (well, other than R scripts or simple parsing shell scripts) in many years, and I have not been in a lab in over 15 years now. I can certainly manage others and oversee programming projects though - I have not forgotten that much!

All the raised points are somehow true and correct. But then I come back to my main point. How do you understand what kind of bioinformatician (user or user/developer) a person is? By googleing I found this (http://www.biotecharticles.com/Bioinformatics-Article/Bioinformaticist-vs-Bioinformatician-Definition-Differences-and-Career-Outlook-215.html)

Bioinformaticist versus Bioinformatician

...

More or less all consideration and consultation, it became predominantly clear that a peculiarity has to be ended between a bioinformaticist and a bioinformatician.

A bioinformaticist is a specialist who not only knows how to use bioinformatics tools, but also knows how to write programs for the effectiveness of the tools.

A bioinformatician, on the other hand, is a skilled person who only knows how to use bioinformatics tools without a deeper understanding.

Thus, a bioinformaticist is referred to as a mechanical engineer. While a bioinformatician is referred to as a technician.

Perhaps it is just the same problem with any professional label or arbitrary categorization? Someone who calls themselves a biologist - what does that really tell you about them? Not very much in essence. Even terms like geneticist have only vague meaning at best.

Given than bioinformatics is purely an invention to try to pigeon-hole people who cross the boundaries of some area of life science and some area of informatics, it never really told you much about people in the very first place, in terms of what they knew and what they actually did.

With just about every scientist I've known who is more than 4 or 5 years out of a post-doc, the label on their degree, or even their resume or business card often carries little information of what they actually know and do. I just place very little emphasis on labels for people as they usually just don't tell me much about them at all.

My degree was in "Ecology & Evolution", yet since then I've sat daily at a computer most of my professional life, and I now publish papers in toxicology? I could simply argue that the primary reason I call myself a bioinformatician is because that is what human resources labels me as in their system. I do mainly call myself that because what I do and have done for 15 years or so clearly crosses the boundary between biology, computational biology, and informatics, whether programming specifically has been part of that at times or not.

I just think we place far too much emphasis on labels and categorizing people. Bioinformatics is not a scientific discipline - it is a made up word to describe a hybrid area of expertise, just like chemoinformatician.

I also do not think that we should get to judge what someone else considers their area of expertise or knowledge. A person's claim to such will stand (or fail) on its own based on their work, publications and reputation from public presentations.

So back to the original post - should their be an anonymous button for members to judge others profile entries? Absolutely not. First, it's internet-cowerdly, to allow anonymous posters on a forum to sit in judgement of others. Second, no one here has the right to judge someone else's professional credentials as presented in their profile. Their profile is theirs. If they blatantly claim something about themselves that is not true, it will be revealed anyway, by their peers based on references, publications and professional record. But not by some anonymous mouse click on a social media web forum.

I understand your point, the suggestion of a negative judgment button was only a provocation. And nevertheless, I don't think it is so bad to be judged by anonymous people, in fact we are every time we submit a paper.

True, but you have a clear and definite arbitrator as well in the editor handling your paper. And the anonymous reviews are not public information.

Well, I am the editor-in-chief of a journal called 'Current Bioinformatics' and I work in the application of multidimensional statistics, non-linear dynamics, graph theory ..to biology since thirty years and I never wrote a line of program. I use SAS (an established statistical software since more than thirty years) and some simple routines in MATLAB and I was able to do my work in these years with many satisfactory results.

In order to give a quantitative representation of biology (or any other science) you need to know mathematics and statistics and to have the mental flexibility to understand what is relavnt and what is not in the particular problem you are dealing, the software with which you perform the computation is purely instrumental..and if someone else already wrote the progam it is much better.

just an update

http://journal.frontiersin.org/article/10.3389/fgene.2015.00164/full