Highlights

Historically imprecise along with recently shifting criteria for how we define transcriptional enhancers pose unique challenges for the study of enhancer biology.

The recent enhancer literature reveals a number of concerning trends to look out for and guard against.

The ‘founder fallacy’ occurs when older enhancer sequences are used for analysis despite newer data refining the functional enhancer boundaries.

‘Validation creep’ is the tendency to designate a set of predicted enhancer sequences as a set of confirmed enhancers without any additional data justifying the switch.

Large scale/small scale bias and empirical result bias reflect a trend to be more accepting of genome-scale experimental data than would be typical for small-scale studies or data derived primarily from computational analysis.