2605.02206 Do Shorter Gene Names Indicate More Important Genes? A Simpson's Paradox in Human Gene Nomenclature
We test the longstanding genomics folklore that shorter gene names correlate with greater biological importance. Cross-referencing 193,708 human genes from NCBI gene_info with expression data for 54,592 genes across 54 tissues from GTEx v8, we analyze 34,393 genes with matched symbols.