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Lab notebooks, whether in print or electronic form, are a critical component of tracking and recording research. Consistent documentation of your research methods, calculations, and results is important not only for your personal use, but will help when you publish or otherwise share research, and when others want to reproduce what you have done.

Listed below are links to several guidelines. Please let us know if there are other guidelines that are used in your lab, institute, or department.

How to Start -- and Keep -- a Laboratory Notebook: Policy and Practical Guidelines (ipHandbook of Best Practices)

Maintaining a Laboratory Notebook (from the excellent Colin Purrington; see his other tips, too)

• The practice of keeping research notebooks, paper vs. electronic (RCR - Data Acquisition and Management)
• Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation Lab Book Guidelines
• UCSF Guidelines for lab notebooks
• Los Alamos National Labs guidelines for maintaining a lab notebook

If you are trying to decide which Lab Notebook is best for your research take a look at the comparison of features and specifications of different Lab Notebooks  compiled by Harvard University.  

(adapted from: University of Oregon )

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• Review Article
• Published: 14 January 2022

Considerations for implementing electronic laboratory notebooks in an academic research environment

• Stuart G. Higgins   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-4653-5364 1 , 2 , 3 ,
• Akemi A. Nogiwa-Valdez   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-1031-2388 1 , 2 , 3 &
• Molly M. Stevens   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-7335-266X 1 , 2 , 3  

Nature Protocols volume  17 ,  pages 179–189 ( 2022 ) Cite this article

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As research becomes predominantly digitalized, scientists have the option of using electronic laboratory notebooks to record and access entries. These systems can more readily meet volume, complexity, accessibility and preservation requirements than paper notebooks. Although the technology can yield many benefits, these can be realized only by choosing a system that properly fulfills the requirements of a given context. This review explores the factors that should be considered when introducing electronic laboratory notebooks to an academically focused research group. We cite pertinent studies and discuss our own experience implementing a system within a multidisciplinary research environment. We also consider how the required financial and time investment is shared between individuals and institutions. Finally, we discuss how electronic laboratory notebooks fit into the broader context of research data management. This article is not a product review; it provides a framework for both the initial consideration of an electronic laboratory notebook and the evaluation of specific software packages.

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Alongside millions of new research publications each year 1 is the creation of millions more laboratory notebook entries. These contain important metadata, reflecting the nuance of experimental work. The ability to readily access, use and share laboratory notebook data allows researchers to quickly infer meaning from results and can help facilitate reproducibility across experiments. Collaborative or multidisciplinary research fields require efficient methods for capturing and sharing notebook entries between a diverse range of scientists.

Research relies on computing to analyze and present data; therefore, storing laboratory notebook entries in a digital format allows them to sit seamlessly alongside research data as they are processed. Electronic laboratory notebooks (ELNs) are fundamentally a means of digitizing entries at the point of creation, enabling those data to be processed computationally. However, they are not a panacea. Before deploying an ELN, it is critical that the requirements of users, as well as the advantages and disadvantages of different approaches, are properly understood to avoid creating a system that hinders rather than helps.

The past 20 years have seen a rapid increase in the number of ELN software packages

ELNs have been mooted in various forms since the late 1950s 2 . In the 1980s, software such as RS/1 (Bolt, Beranek and Newman, Inc.) offered researchers the capability to store, analyze and comment on data 3 , 4 . ELNs are presented as a tool for improving the reproducibility of research by facilitating the transfer of vital experimental details, both between generations of researchers and across different research groups 5 , 6 . Recording, accessing and preserving paper-based records can be slow, inefficient and difficult to integrate with modern computer-controlled data capture systems. However, implementing an ELN is non-trivial. Its adoption requires clear understanding of notebook use in a given laboratory setting and the provision of sufficient resources.

Most current ELNs are commercial offerings. These offer access to proprietary software, typically hosted remotely and available via subscription, under a software-as-a-service (SaaS) business model. A few community-developed open-source ELNs exist, with freely accessible codebases. There are also a small number of commercial ELNs with open-source codebases and free (to non-profit organizations) ELNs with proprietary codebases. Reviewing specific products is beyond the scope of this article; however, a number of product comparisons are available online 7 , 8 , 9 , 10 .

In the past 20 years, the number of ELNs has increased dramatically, as the benefits of digitization have been recognised (Fig. 1 ). In this marketplace, not all ELNs have proven successful. A significant number of both commercially available and open-source software packages have ultimately become defunct. In our analysis ( Supplementary Method ) of 172 ELN products (96 active and 76 defunct), the average lifetime of an ELN was found to be 7 ± 4.4 years (median ± consistent median absolute deviation). The lifetimes break down as 6 ± 4.4 years ( n = 25) and 7 ± 4.4 years ( n = 147) for open-source and proprietary codebases, respectively. The longest-running open-source ELN in our survey was ELOG (Stefan Ritt, Paul Scherrer Institut) 11 , which has been active for 20 years. The longest-running proprietary ELN that we found was Gene Inspector (Textco BioSoftware, Inc.) 12 , which has been active for 25 years. Company acquisitions, changes in the commercial market and lack of developer support or funding for open-source projects can all result in defunct ELNs. Long-term support and data access should be a primary concern when implementing an ELN: many benefits (e.g., rapid access to historic notebook entries) disappear if archived material is trapped inside inaccessible legacy systems, or worse, deleted. Procedures for extracting and archiving data in accessible formats should be part of any deployment strategy.

The areas of the circles shown at the top of the figure are proportional to the numbers of new ELNs launched in a given year. Data are segregated into proprietary (blue) and open-source (pink) codebases and sorted within these categories according to the number of years that the software has been active. Insets are screenshots of a selection of ELNs, showing the progression of software development with time, including: RS/1 (Bolt Beranek and Newman Inc.), adapted with permission from ref. 3 , ACS; ELOG (Stefan Ritt, Paul Scherrer Institute), reproduced with permission from ref. 11 ; eLabFTW (Deltablot), reproduced with permission from ref. 24 ; OSF (Centre for Open Science), reproduced with permission from ref. 58 under a CC-BY 4.0 license. See Supplementary Method for a description of the survey methodology and limitations. This plot incorporates data from primary and secondary sources 9 , 14 , 59 . An interactive version of this figure, along with any updates, is available from a data repository (Zenodo) supporting this paper 52 .

Before choosing an ELN, the purpose of the laboratory notebook must be identified

A laboratory notebook serves various purposes. For the researcher, it is a record of experiments and work conducted. The notebook may describe experimental methods, be a direct record of original data or provide metadata required to contextualize other data. Formal metadata (experimental test parameters and control conditions) may be supplemented by unplanned observations and annotations, both facilitating data analysis and interpretation. A notebook may journal both the genesis of ideas and the decision-making process 13 . Successfully capturing this information is critical to the researcher and others attempting to replicate the work.

Laboratory notebooks can be used to enforce good practice and to standardize workflows. For example, institutions may mandate the inclusion of risk-assessment templates within synthetic chemistry notebooks to encourage researchers to identify and mitigate hazards immediately before conducting a reaction. Routine procedures with well-defined outputs may follow a standard notebook template, to streamline information capture and standardize record keeping or to record quality-control procedures. This process can aid adherence to best research practices, such as ensuring that enough details are captured to facilitate reproducibility. An ELN can simplify this by acting as a database of templates and protocols 14 , 15 . For researchers, managers and institutions, laboratory notebooks provide evidence of work completed, facilitating internal accountability and providing a legal record to demonstrate regulatory compliance and potentially aiding intellectual property protection.

Identifying a given laboratory’s requirements defines and constrains the choice of ELN. Academic research laboratories typically feature a diverse range of experiments, data types and disciplines, resulting in users having different requirements from the same ELN package 16 . Although many ELNs are specialist products targeting researchers in a specific domain (e.g., biochemistry or pharmacology), these may not be relevant or sufficiently flexible for most researchers. Although this limitation was recognized by the early creators of ELNs in the 1990s 17 , it remains an issue that has been highlighted again in recent studies 14 . Record keeping may be required to meet regulatory standards, for example, for laboratories accredited to the testing and calibration standards ISO 17025:2017 and ISO 15189:2012 18 , 19 , which stipulate requirements for laboratory information management, or for those wishing to adhere to general electronic record-keeping standards such as the Code of Federal Regulations Title 21 Part 11 20 . The motivating factors and requirements for a research group may not be the same as those of other groups at the same host institution, so care must be taken to identify the priorities of different stakeholders before selecting a particular product.

ELNs recover researcher time and enable better research practices, in return for financial cost

ELNs provide quality-of-life improvements over paper notebooks. In environments where ELNs have been implemented, the ease with which information can be sought and shared is regarded as one of the key benefits 15 , 21 . Figure 2 illustrates different ways that information can be shared via an ELN. Making ELN entries visible to multiple users is often simple to accomplish within the software. Project teams can instantly access relevant experimental data from different researchers, facilitating project management. Supervisors can remotely provide feedback without physical access to a notebook and add digital signatures to verify entries. Collaborators can be geographically separate, working in separate laboratories across multiple countries. Similarly, researchers can access their records from multiple locations, for example, from different laboratories or from home. This can be an advantage where physical access to facilities is restricted, as seen during the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic. It also mitigates the need to transport physical laboratory notebooks between locations, reducing the risk of cross-contamination and data loss.

Researchers can create and secure entries, share information with colleagues and collaborators and access the records of former team members. The degree of sharing is dictated by local policy, software features and configuration.

Notebook entries can be archived in situ as team members leave, while allowing incoming students and staff instant access. The ability to rapidly search through all available content allows researchers to filter and access ELN entries pertinent to their own work 13 , 21 . When users leave an organization, if permitted, an ELN allows them to create copies of their entries for future reference. This can allow quick access to previous and ongoing research ideas as a researcher progresses through their career. Physically storing and preserving digital data over long periods is more space and time efficient than attempting to store paper notebooks.

Table 1 illustrates how the differences between interacting with paper and electronic laboratory notebooks are ultimately a choice between time and money. Paper notebooks can be an inexpensive medium, but executing actions that are trivial with an ELN (e.g., searching, sharing and data backup) are time expensive. Conversely, most ELNs are relatively expensive to implement and maintain, compared to paper notebooks, but provide far greater functionality at a much lower time cost to the researcher. Actions such as searching, reordering, sharing and archiving can be extremely fast compared to paper notebooks. Depending on the implementation, ELNs may introduce a time delay for users because they require turning on hardware and authenticating into the software before a notebook entry can be made. The degree to which this is an issue depends on the hardware (a modern tablet can wake and unlock within 1 s) and software (biometric authentication can offer rapid logins, or, more commonly, local policy can dictate how long user sessions remain active before forcing reauthentication).

The operating environment affects both paper and electronic notebooks. Laboratories that contain some form of protected environment (e.g., cleanrooms or biological containment laboratories) may have restrictions on the movement of items into and out of the space. Both paper notebooks and computer hardware can be contaminated in the laboratory. An ELN may help alleviate these issues by allowing access to notebooks via devices that remain inside the protected environment. However, this requires pre-planning of hardware requirements.

When considering any ELN system, the benefits of enabling more time to be dedicated to research and improving knowledge transfer and experimental reproducibility are balanced against financial costs. Recognizing who will bear these costs is important. For example, relying upon users to provide their own computing device to access an ELN effectively transfers this cost onto the researcher. This may cause people to spurn ELN adoption and disadvantages researchers without existing devices, as seen in studies of undergraduate web-based learning technologies 22 , 23 . If a laboratory already has a sufficient number of network-connected workstations, then this cost may be nil; otherwise, it can form a significant proportion of the overall implementation cost (a factor that is not included in any software vendor pricing).

An ELN is typically a combination of a user interface, a centralized database and a file store

Figure 3 illustrates a simplified view of a commonly adopted ELN architecture (although many different approaches are possible) 11 , 24 , 25 , 26 , 27 . Notebook entries may be stored in a relational database with attached files in a file store, with the ELN software facilitating user access and defining how notebook entries can be written and read. The software may be accessed via a web browser or in some cases through a custom application written for a specific platform (e.g., desktop or mobile operating system apps). Application-based ELNs may cause compatibility issues in academic research environments that typically feature a diverse range of operating systems 28 . Depending on the implementation, the separate ELN components may be separate servers 27 , in different physical locations. This major conceptual shift from paper notebooks brings both opportunities and challenges. Although the underlying technology is ideally invisible to the end user, the choice of ELN can influence the availability of different features. For example, most ELNs are ill suited to storing large volumes of raw data (either from a performance or cost perspective). A locally hosted ELN server may rapidly run out of physical storage space if not appropriately provisioned. A cloud-hosted server may quickly incur significant hosting costs as storage and bandwidth requirements increase. Even with these restrictions, the amount of information that can be stored is more than is possible with paper notebooks, which can store only small quantities of data.

Users interact with the ELN software via workstations and/or mobile devices, with off-premises access possible via technologies such as virtual private networks (VPNs) or by exposing the ELN to the wider internet (the latter introducing additional security concerns). Experimental hardware may interact directly with the ELN server (e.g., via an application programming interface (API)). The ELN software, database and file storage may coexist on the same physical server or operate on separate hardware. The server may be run as a local installation at an institution or as part of a cloud-hosted product from the software vendor. Additional requirements include backup servers, which should be geographically separate from the ELN (and should consist of multiple layers of redundancy). Third-party services include access to single sign-on servers (to facilitate a better user experience), trusted third-party timestamping authorities (for independently digitally signing notebook entries) or other laboratory systems (such as laboratory inventory management systems).

Sensitive data (e.g., patient or commercially sensitive information) may fall under local institution or legally mandated data-protection regulations (e.g., GDPR 2016/679 29 , which dictates the handling and safeguarding of personal data within the European Union). This may restrict the physical location and transfer of data, excluding the use of off-premises ELNs that use international cloud-based infrastructure 30 . Locally hosted ELNs may provide greater control over data security by restricting notebook access to users inside an institutional network (i.e., access devices must be physically on the premises or connected to the internal network remotely, for example, by using a virtual private network).

Data integrity can be enhanced by using version control and timestamping

The ability to create immutable notebook entries that cannot be removed or altered after creation is critical for academic and legal integrity. Paper notebooks typically implement this through rules and procedures (e.g., by prohibiting the removal of pages and signing and counter-signing entries). Not all ELNs address this issue, again precluding the use of some products. For example, general note-taking software packages, such as Microsoft OneNote and Evernote, do not typically include features to digitally sign or timestamp entries, with workarounds such as signing exported files required 28 , 31 . The level of verification required depends on both regulatory requirements and locally accepted laboratory notebook standards. For example, it may be sufficient to rely upon administrator-defined software features, such as the ability of a supervisor to lock notebook entries to prevent them from being edited or to disable entry deletion. Many ELN packages include a mechanism for version tracking, which record how a document is edited over time, a potential deterrent to modifying entries after the fact. This is a conceptual difference between paper and electronic notebooks. In a paper notebook, entries are instantly recorded (presuming some form of indelible ink is used). In an electronic notebook, there is typically a finite amount of time during which the entered text or other content remains malleable before it is saved to the server. This period can range from seconds to minutes, with the server creating intermediate versions of the entry, or a longer period until the entry is locked or finalized through some technical means. Excessive versioning may significantly increase storage requirements and overall running costs; hence, local policy is required to determine a suitable compromise for the period of time between making an entry and some form of versioning and ultimately finalization.

If verifying the provenance of notebook entries is critical, the ELN should incorporate technologies that adhere to recognized standards for trusted timestamping, such as RFC 3161 32 or ANSI X9.95-2016 33 . Trusted timestamping uses an audited third-party organization (typically a commercial provider) to digitally sign and timestamp a file. A cryptographic hashing algorithm is applied to a digital file (e.g., a portable document format file that corresponds to a notebook entry. The algorithm generates a file containing a hash (a mathematically unique representation of the original data). This hash cannot easily be reverse-engineered to recreate the original data and thus can be safely transmitted to the trusted timestamping authority via the internet. The authority digitally signs and timestamps the hash, in the process generating a third file (a timestamp token). This token is sent back to the ELN software and stored alongside the original portable document format file. Any modifications to the original file will invalidate the token, because recalculating the hash of the modified file will result in one different from the value contained within the digitally signed token. The process allows a digital file’s contents at a given point in time to be verified. Although technically complex, this process is typically performed invisibly to the user.

While trusted timestamping incorporates the concept of digital signatures, it adds the additional benefit of not only verifying the signer’s identity but also the time at which an entry was timestamped. In practical terms, local policy is required to ensure that users routinely timestamp their notebook entries, as the date and time of timestamping are being recorded, not the instant when an experiment was conducted. Procedures for archiving data should ensure that both the timestamped file and the timestamp token are properly preserved.

Open-source and commercial ELNs have different costs and benefits

In our survey, commercial ELNs were observed to be far more prevalent than open-source ELNs (147 versus 24 products identified). Table 2 compares commercial to open-source approaches. Although SaaS is a widely adopted licensing model (e.g., institutional subscriptions to Microsoft Office 365 or Google Workspace), SaaS ELNs may be prohibitively expensive for individual research groups because of per-user pricing, ever-growing file-storage costs and an indefinite subscription required to maintain access. In 2017, Kanza et al. reported that, in a survey of 169 users participating in an ELN pilot study, both limited financial budgets and the time required to implement an ELN were major concerns 14 . Similarly, although open-source ELNs can have relatively low initial and ongoing financial costs, they require time to run and maintain and may require server hardware to be purchased. The relatively modest requirements for many open-source ELNs make it feasible to repurpose old computing hardware to act as an ELN server, helping to reduce this cost. Costs can scale with the size of deployment; for example, commercial site-wide licenses may be negotiated at preferential rates rather than the per-user pricing available to individual research groups 34 . Implementing an open-source ELN at institutional scale can take advantage of pre-existing server infrastructure and support from information communication technologies departments. Some commercial providers offer free or reduced pricing for academic users 14 .

Open-source ELNs have the benefit of allowing not only the data to be archived, but also the underlying software itself. Technologies such as virtualization and containerization present feasible pathways to preserve the operating environment of the ELN for future access, beyond software and hardware obsolescence. For example, provided the codebase has been properly archived, open-source ELN software may be resurrected as a virtual machine within a modern operating system, to allow historic file access and export. This can help facilitate future file interoperability by providing easy access to the original software. The open codebase also means that data formats and standards are fully exposed, facilitating the future development of tools to reparse or extract data. When assessing an ELN hosted by a third party, consider what will happen to notebook entries when the product is discontinued. Some open-source projects (such as the Open Science Framework) 35 may include contingency plans and funds to ensure the ongoing preservation of research data. If an ELN provides data export functions, these should be tested to confirm that they provide the required level of functionality. For commercial ELNs, it should be ensured that supplier contracts include the necessary terms to facilitate data export.

ELNs are not a solution to poor data management

ELNs do not resolve the challenge of systematically storing raw data and are just one part of a holistic data management strategy. Successfully implementing an ELN requires reflection on current practice to determine how a laboratory handles and stores information 36 , 37 . As with paper notebooks, policy, training and enforcement are required to ensure that users record timely, useful and complete notebook entries. New users require training to understand the purpose and expectations of laboratory notebook use within a given organization. A policy for how, when and by whom notebooks are monitored sets expectations. An offboarding procedure should be implemented to ensure that outgoing user data are appropriately archived.

Procedures for linking raw data, laboratory notebook entries, analyzed data and publication data should be clearly defined and enforced. Data should be stored on centralized group or measurement-specific servers or publicly available repositories, with redundant backups. Persistent identifiers such as digital object identifiers can be used to help link resources, with ELN entries acting as centralized documents that connect to multiple files and data 36 . Some ELNs already generate unique identifiers for each notebook entry 24 . To help verify the integrity of externally stored data, ELNs can be used to record cryptographic hashes of data files.

Some ELNs feature application programming interfaces that allow other software to directly read and write notebook entries 24 . For example, a user conducting a computer-controlled experiment could allow that equipment to directly record experimental or process details, potentially streamlining routine measurements. Laboratories with well-defined workflows, such as electron microscopy 38 or genetic analysis 27 , may benefit from specialized ELNs that incorporate notebook entries within the data capture workflow or that have been designed with equipment integration as a primary goal.

Successful ELNs recognize the needs of their users

Within an academic research environment, both time and money are at a premium. Ideally, if adopted, ELNs for the academic research laboratory should be implemented at the institutional level, harnessing existing ICT infrastructure, and with a sufficient commitment for ongoing support to encourage uptake 39 . Although a handful of university-based surveys and studies of ELN implementation exist 14 , 39 , 40 , the reported level of success varies, suggesting that careful user engagement, product choice and ongoing support are key to successful deployment.

Critically, the implementation of an ELN should not introduce a net burden to the user. If users are unable or unwilling to use time-saving features, adopting an ELN may ultimately be a hindrance. For example, for a researcher who regularly draws chemical structures or writes equations into their notebook, most non-specialist ELNs will be less convenient than paper 39 , and the introduction of an ELN may be undesirable 16 . Lack of support for systems such as LaTeX can be a barrier to adoption in specific disciplines 41 . Recognizing the needs of an often-diverse range of researchers is essential before making decisions on the choice of software and approach.

Internal trialing of a small number of products, jointly agreed compromises or incorporating integrations with specialist solutions, such as ELNs capable of handling chemical structures 42 , may be required. Simple infrastructure factors, such as unreliable WiFi 7 , 14 , 23 , insufficient benchspace to place a laptop computer 14 or lack of access to up-to-date hardware and software in the laboratory, can also adversely affect users 39 . The prevalent culture of private and personal academic laboratory notebooks should be recognized, with one ELN study noting that researchers felt embarrassed when required to share their notebook with colleagues 43 .

User training should be recognized as an additional time burden, with researchers already expected to master a wide range of software packages 44 . Similarly, many laboratories already use laboratory information management systems for inventory handling, equipment booking and procurement. Introducing a further standalone system can work against the time benefits of digitization and integration 45 . Implementing an ELN is an opportunity to reflect upon and consolidate existing practice, with many ELNs incorporating laboratory information management system–style components. Similarly, if it is intended for the ELN to integrate with specific pieces of hardware, it cannot be assumed that software will work seamlessly; thus, system integration should be tested before deployment, and the appropriate resources should be allocated to maintain the integration.

To date, there have been no published multi-year longitudinal studies of ELN implementation in academic environments. Hence, it is important to consider user issues that may appear over longer time scales. For example, determining how future researchers will be made aware of existing records if the original author (or the author’s supervisor) has left the institution. Individuals should be identified who will facilitate access requests to existing records from new users. Investing in user training from the start should ensure that third parties are able to effectively locate these records in the future (i.e., that sufficient notation and metadata are being captured at the point of entry). Academic institutions may be able to take advantage of the existing in-house expertise of academic librarians, research data managers, compliance administrators, systems administrators and archivists to help develop long-term workable policies. The general challenge of long-term digital data preservation and access exists within any large organization (e.g., email preservation), so leveraging existing good practice may aid deployment.

Box 1 describes our own experience of implementing an open-source ELN, illustrating some of the points discussed in the article. The choices made arose out of the specific set of circumstances appropriate to our research group; thus, this should be considered not as a prescription for the best approach to implementing an ELN but rather as a reflection on what we have learned.

Box 1 Case study of implementing an open-source ELN

Since 2018, the authors have used eLabFTW as our ELN 24 . The criteria for identifying a suitable ELN focused on accommodating scientists from multiple disciplines (e.g., cell biologists, synthetic chemists and engineers) and the correspondingly diverse range of laboratory environments. Much of the research is applied, so reliable timestamping integration was considered essential for intellectual property protection. With a large number of active users at any given time, the system had to scale affordably, with persistent and ready long-term access to archived user data.

The large number of users meant that the projected ongoing per-user subscription costs for commercial products were considerable. This potential cost combined with our other criteria led us to select the open-source software eLabFTW after a successful 6-month trial before wider deployment. The server runs locally behind an institutional firewall on modest repurposed hardware. The trial period allowed a local ELN policy to be developed. No user is forced to use the ELN, existing lab members can switch to the system and new members are offered the choice of electronic or paper notebooks. However, users may not operate both types concurrently, to avoid data fragmentation. All new users go through an induction and training process. Compliance with the policy is checked periodically to ensure that users are timestamping their entries (eLabFTW provides server- and user-level statistics to facilitate this).

Financial costs included purchasing an uninterruptable power supply (~£300), a network-attached storage device (~£190; one component of a multisite backup strategy) and a subscription to the third-party trusted timestamping authority (~£70/year). Indirect costs included the time of a researcher to act as system administrator to set up and configure the server (taking advantage of existing expertise within the group), support from institutional ICT staff to support configuration and integration with existing institutional services and the time cost of running regular user induction and training. Ongoing costs include administering the server (~3 h/month, performed internally by senior researchers within the research group) and training (~3 h/month).

After ~2.5 years, ~60% of current laboratory members have active ELN accounts. Anecdotally, onboarding new students and staff as they arrive in the group appears to minimize the inconvenience of adopting an ELN, as they develop their new workflows concurrently with learning how to use the system, as well as adapting to the wider standards and protocols of the group surrounding research data management and reporting.

Challenges have included occasional software bugs, requiring a workaround until an update was available. A handful of network- and power-related issues have resulted in a total downtime of ~3 d over the course of 3 years. Ongoing user training has included reminders of the importance to timestamp entries. The generic nature of notebook entries has presented some challenges for computational scientists, where computational notebooks are limited to file attachments within the ELN, an inelegant solution for those used to working with version-control systems such as Git. Understanding how new users use the ELN is an ongoing challenge—we have found that using a dedicated communications channel in Microsoft Teams has aided this process. In the long term, the ELN is reliant on having suitably qualified researchers able to administer the system (one of the costs of an open-source solution).

The advantages have included the ability to readily share laboratory notebook entries between users, for example, protocol sharing within the same project and providing new students and researchers with direct access to the work of former group members. This has included during the COVID-19 pandemic, where users are able to access the ELN from home. Students are able to share notebook entries directly and remotely with senior researchers, meaning that they can efficiently receive guidance, again useful in a period where laboratory access has been restricted. It has been observed that since the ELN has been introduced, the user base has grown spontaneously with awareness of the system.

ELNs are an opportunity to consider the broader philosophy of academic laboratory research

With care, ELNs can be used to support information capture, making it more consistent, accessible and usable to both current and future generations of scientists. Implementing an ELN provides an opportunity to consider how digitized notebook entries can help address some of the broader challenges of academic research. For example, some ELNs cater to aspects of open science 46 , 47 , allowing them to be configured to share data outside of organizations, supporting initiatives such as the FAIR Data Principles (a proposal that scientific data should be findable, accessible, interoperable and reusable) 48 . Similarly, the integration of ELNs with institutional repositories may offer new opportunities to tackle the challenge of research data management, such as efforts by the University of Edinburgh to allow users to directly deposit data into an institutional repository via their ELN interface 49 .

Adopting an ELN abstracts the user from the underlying notebook storage technology, allowing a wide range of other approaches to be implemented, different from the one illustrated in Fig. 3 . Rather than using a private database of notebook entries, an ELN could implement a publicly distributed, decentralized record store, by using technologies such as blockchain and peer-to-peer networking 50 , to aid accountability or reduce the reliance on only one repository for long-term data storage. For example, the research project bloxberg is a blockchain operated by an academic consortium 51 that has been independently integrated into the ELN eLabFTW 24 . Cryptographic hashes of notebook entries can be timestamped and recorded on a publicly accessible ledger, distributed across the consortium network, thus removing the need for a single trusted third-party timestamping authority. In effect, verification of the integrity of notebook entries (or other scientific data) is distributed among the consortium members.

Because ELNs provide the primary interface to research data, there is the opportunity to consider how they can integrate with computational approaches that aim to automatically derive insights into the data. This could include the integration of an ELN with computational semantic technologies 16 , which allow the meaning of human language to be automatically inferred. This would allow research metadata to be automatically derived, aiding search efforts, or create automated insights by linking relevant data together 45 . Alternatively, an ELN might be integrated with existing community-defined ontologies and databases for specific disciplines. In this scenario, the ELN would act both as a form of input validation, ensuring that data are captured according to community standards, and as a mechanism for facilitating access to underlying data to facilitate large scale meta-analyses.

In summary, for researchers and institutions considering implementing an ELN, a nuanced understanding of laboratory culture is needed to facilitate a respectful and ultimately user-supported deployment. The barriers to entry must be carefully managed because these have the potential to create technological divides within the academic community, diluting the benefits of ELNs. Successful ELN implementation should be seen as an ongoing commitment to ensure that the needs of different users continue to be met. Given that the current median lifetime of ELN software packages is 7 years, it is of utmost importance to have sufficient ongoing institutional support to maximize the value to researchers and mitigate the risks, enabling continuity when software changes are required. With careful consideration, successful implementation of an ELN presents a pathway to greater knowledge development and transfer within academic research.

Data availability

The raw data, containing the product names, manufacturers, estimated release and defunct dates and corresponding web references to support these estimates, along with the R Notebook used to generate the figures and an interactive version of Fig. 1 , are publicly available from a data repository (Zenodo): https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.5012729 52 . The analysis used various R software packages 53 , 54 , 55 , 56 , 57 .

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Acknowledgements

S.G.H. acknowledges support from a Cancer Research UK award (C71717/A30035). S.G.H., A.A.N.-V. and M.M.S. acknowledge support from a Wellcome Trust Senior Investigator Award (098411/Z/12/Z). M.M.S. acknowledges support from the UK Regenerative Medicine Platform ‘Acellular/Smart Materials - 3D Architecture’ (MR/R015651/1). M.M.S. acknowledges support from the Royal Academy of Engineering under the Chairs in Emerging Technologies scheme (CIET2021\94). The authors acknowledge the feedback and suggestions provided by the reviewers and editorial team, which helped improve the quality and breadth of the manuscript.

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S.G.H. and A.A.N.-V. wrote the manuscript. M.M.S. supervised the work and edited the manuscript.

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S.G.H. and A.A.N.-V. are the system administrators for the Stevens Group ELN, which uses the open-source software package eLabFTW. S.G.H. has provided feedback via public forums to the developer of eLabFTW.

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Higgins, S.G., Nogiwa-Valdez, A.A. & Stevens, M.M. Considerations for implementing electronic laboratory notebooks in an academic research environment. Nat Protoc 17 , 179–189 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41596-021-00645-8

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RELEVANT SLIDES

• Intro to Jupyter Notebooks This class is designed for first-time and longer-term users of Jupyter Notebooks, a workspace for writing code. The class focuses on using Notebooks to facilitate sharing and publishing of script workflows. It aims to provide users with knowledge about shortcuts, plugins, and best practices for maximizing re-usability and shareability of Notebook contents.

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JUPYTER NOTEBOOKS

The Jupyter Notebook is an interactive computing environment that enables users to author notebook documents that include code, interactive widgets, plots, narrative text, equations, images and even video! The Jupyter name comes from 3 programming languages: Julia, Python, and R. It is a popular tool for literate programming. Donald Knuth first defined literate programming as a script, notebook, or computational document that contains an explanation of the program logic in a natural language (e.g. English or Mandarin), interspersed with snippets of macros and source code, which can be compiled and rerun. You can think of it as an executable paper!

The Jupyter Notebook combines three components ( from the docs ):

The notebook web application : An interactive web application for writing and running code interactively and authoring notebook documents.

Kernels : Separate processes started by the notebook web application that runs users’ code in a given language (e.g. python, R, Julia, Go, and more -- get the full list of kernels from the wiki ) and returns output back to the notebook web application. The kernel also handles things like computations for interactive widgets, tab completion and introspection.

Notebook documents : Self-contained documents that contain a representation of all content visible in the notebook web application, including inputs and outputs of the computations, narrative text, equations, images, and rich media representations of objects. Each notebook document has its own kernel. You can export your notebook as many other formats, even LaTex and PDF!

The main components of the interface, from top to bottom:

• The notebook name: you can change by clicking on it. This is also the name of the .ipynb file.
• The menu bar gives you access to several actions pertaining to the notebook (like saving it!) and the kernel (like restarting it!)
• To the right of the menu bar is the Kernel name. You can change the kernel language of your notebook from the Kernel menu (to another programming language).
• The toolbar contains icons for common actions. In particular, the dropdown menu showing Code lets you change the type of a cell.
• Below all that is the actual Notebook. It consists of a linear list of cells, which you can change the type of (markdown or code). You should only run your notebook from top to bottom – ONLY. If you make a lot of edits, go to Kernel > Restart & Run All before considering your work finished.

Jupyter notebooks can be comprised mainly of two types of cells (though more can be added with plugins).

• Markdown Cells (for narratives): when run, a markdown cell will display markdown or HTML that you write (that means all sort of rich content, including images). Essential markdown summary: https://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/syntax
• Code Cells (for data cleaning, analysis, visualization, etc.): executable code in a variety of languages, dictated by the kernel (default is Python, but more can be added).

Some key jupyter notebook shortcuts to keep in mind while you work:

Use shift + enter to run an active cell

Use esc in highlighted cell to toggle command options:

esc + L   shows line numbers

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esc + a inserts a cell above current cell

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Check all current variables: run %whos from a code cell

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You can install Jupyter notebooks and some key kernels on your computer in a few ways:

Our recommended method is to download using Anaconda (make sure you select version 3.*), which gives you Jupyter, python 3, and a lot of key python libraries for research: https://www.anaconda.com/download/ . After you've finished downloading + installing with Anaconda, you should see an application "Jupyter notebooks" in your list of applications.

If you're comfortable with the terminal you can also install Jupyter Notebooks with pip:

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Laboratory notebooks are the primary records many researchers use to document the hypotheses, methodology, results, and analysis of their research. Electronic Laboratory Notebooks (ELNs) move these records into digital formats and add functionality such as collaboration, templates, searching, and specialized functions that support data collection and analysis.

Disciplines, institutions, and research groups have different cultures and standards for lab notebooks and this page does not provide best practices for maintaining a lab notebook. The goal of this page is to provide some basic questions to ask when looking for an ELN that will work for you and to link to some major ELN products.

Questions to consider

There are many different ELNs to choose from and each differs in cost, functionality, and user experience. It’s useful to think start by thinking about your needs before looking at different products. Here are some questions to consider when selecting an ELN. Please contact us if you would like to meet with a librarian to help with assessing and selecting an ELN.

• How much will the product cost? Is it a one-time cost or a recurring cost (subscription)? Will you be able to sustain access for as long as you need?
• What happens when you stop using the ELN? Can you export notebooks to a usable format? What functionality do you lose when you export it?
• How do you want to grant control and monitor access to your notebooks? (e.g. Do you need an audit trail that records who makes changes? Does each lab member ‘own’ their own notebook or do you ‘own’ every notebook? Do users need access to each other’s notebooks?)
• What types of information do you need to record and how much space will you require? (e.g. text, images, Microsoft Office documents, outputs from instruments, other data files, etc.)
• What specialized functionality do you require? (e.g. chemical structure drawing, lab inventory control, protocols and templates, etc.)
• Do you work with sensitive data and if so does the product provide measures to protect that data?

Comparison of major products

The following is a list of just a few products that can be used as ELNs. The focus is on general products; a link to a list of other products is below. Each of these products is available via the web (cloud-based storage).

• Comprehensive comparison of various ELN products  from Harvard
• Searchable database of ELNs that can be filtered by over 40 criteria from the German National Library of Medicine ( ZB MED ), in cooperation with the Technical University of Darmstadt .
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Electronic Research Notebook

What is an electronic research notebook.

An Electronic Research Notebook (ERN), typically referred to as an electronic laboratory notebook (ELN),  is a tool that can make documenting your research activities easier and more efficient. It provides a multi-functional data manager that can quickly and accurately import protocols, notes, observations and other research data so that you can organize all your information in one place. You can link to data files and other information so nothing relating to your research is lost or misplaced.

ASU has licensed LabArchives as our ERN solution and offers the product at no cost to faculty, researchers, staff and students for research activities. Using LabArchives will improve the quality of your research notes and help you process your findings more efficiently.

Your research data will be stored securely in the cloud on equipment located in the U.S. Security and availability of ASU research data is a top priority for the university and LabArchives includes numerous technical and administrative safeguards to ensure ASU’s data are stored securely. Refer to the data considerations page to explore if LabArchives meets your needs.

Getting started with LabArchives

• Ready to create your ASU LabArchives account? Just click on the “New Account Login” button on the sidebar menu.
• Do you want to get your account organized? You can find a quick start guide  here .
• If you decide to share data with others you will need to think about the role you will give. You will find guidance on that  here .
• Once you have your LabArchives account, you will want to organize your notebook. Use the tutorials in the Knowledgebase  for instructions.
• Check out the  Knowledgebase  for more information on how to get the most benefit from LabArchives
• You will also find lots of  video tutorials  on YouTube that explain how to use the product.

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LabArchives provides full access to the research productivity of my lab, at any time, from anywhere, by anyone who is a member of my research team. It is searchable and shareable, allowing my researchers to easily share their lab notebook content (protocols, results, plans) with each other and with me. I have set up a private notebook for myself (outside of my research group’s notebook), where I record meeting notes, capture grant ideas, etc. I used to keep these records in a paper notebook, until one got stolen – along with my backpack and laptop – on a foreign trip. The information on the laptop was all backed up to the cloud, so nothing was lost, but I didn’t have a back-up of my paper notebook. That’s when I decided I needed to move to electronic record keeping for all of my University work.

The research on bright electron beams performed in my lab requires the development of a lot of new measurement techniques and instrumentation. Hence an ERN that has a predefined format or template does not work for us. Labarchives is very flexible in terms of the format one can use for data and record entry and easily links to Office documents. It gives the flexibility of a physical lab notebook that researchers are often used to along with the convenience of digital record-keeping, easy searchability, and remote accessibility that ERNs provide.

My lab started using LabArchives recently and we love it! Now that nearly all lab data is or becomes electronic in format it makes record keeping so much easier. And it makes it much easier for my group members and I to review and share data and notes – which has helped improve work efficiency during this coronavirus pandemic when people are trying not to overlap too much in the lab/office.

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Electronic research notebooks: what are erns.

• What are ERNs?
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What is an electronic research notebook?

Electronic research notebooks (ERNs) meet the demands of modern science by creating a digital, organized, and secure recordkeeping environment for scientists to efficiently function in an increasingly interdisciplinary and collaborative community. 

For hundreds of years, the paper notebook has played a key role in how scientific research has been conducted and served as the official record for measurements and observations. As the production and dissemination of scientific data has moved to digital formats and workflows, ERNs can help to streamline the data recording, access, and sharing throughout the research lifecycle.

Why use an electronic research notebook?

Electronic Research Notebooks offer the opportunity for scientists to make the output of scientific research more accessible and improve reproducibility and productivity in their work. 

Additionally, a 2013 memo from the Office of Science and Technology Policy and federal funding agencies are now holding scientists conducting research in academia accountable for providing infrastructure to support research data management. 

Other practical reasons for using an ERN platform include:

• Improved data curation for future reuse
• Track provenance of experiments
• Search individual notebooks and/or colleague notebooks
• Reduce work duplication
• Improve legibility
• Reduce pasting of automated results

Relevant Literature

• Electronic Notebooks: A New Leaf (2005) An article featured in Nature discussing the adoption of ERNs in industry compared to academic research and reasoning behind why ERNs should be adopted into the research lifecycle.
• Electronic lab notebooks: can they replace paper? (2017) An article in the Journal of Cheminformatics discussing two main issues identified that prevent researchers from adopting ERNs and the development of a cloud base notebook platform attempting to overcome the barriers.
• Considerations for implementing electronic laboratory notebooks in an academic research environment (2022) An article in Nature Protocols discussing the introduction of electronic lab notebooks in an academic research group, including the role of ELNs in the context of research data management.

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15 Laboratory Notebook Tips to Help with your Research Manuscript

Your lab notebook is a foundation to your research manuscript. It serves almost as a rudimentary draft of your research story. A well-kept laboratory notebook not only leads to effective reporting but it also reduces headache.

In the beginning, when first keeping a lab notebook, there can be a lot of trial and error. However, by incorporating these tips at the get-go will minimize the error portion.

Why keeping a formal laboratory notebook is important

Detailed notes are the only way to keep track of what you did and how you did it. Furthermore, the formal nature of the laboratory notebook ensures certain records are always made and that they’re made the same way. These standards are deemed necessary by your organization in order to ensure scientific conduct and reproducibility.

Beyond that, however, are several other reasons a formal record is crucial (Hunter & Hughey, 2007):

• Promotes accurate collaboration.
• Promotes reproducibility not just for other researchers but for yourself as well.
• Maintains the reasoning behind your experimental flow.
• Serves as the building blocks of your research paper’s methods, results and conclusion.
• Serves as a log of all observations and anomalies.
• Becomes a helpful troubleshooting tool.
• Allows you to answer specific experimental questions.
• Can help defend your intellectual property, particularly when it comes to patents.

When a lab notebook isn’t properly organized or maintained, you’ll find yourself scrambling to figure out what sample went into the 4 th lane of your gel, or why you ran a PCR for the specific primers you chose, or did you run an ELISA – you remember running that ELISA, but you can’t remember when or find the paper towel you wrote the details on (yes a paper towel – bad habits must be broken quickly).

1. Avoid bad notebook habits

It is very easy to form bad habits when keeping a lab notebook. Some of these habits stem from simply not knowing a better way. Other bad habits are formed from poor examples, poor guidelines or poor time management.

In any case, it’s easy to break bad notebook habits by first recognizing a few examples of them.

• Avoid the chore mentality of lab notebook entries. The notebook is sacred .
• Avoid pencils. Use pens (better yet, waterproof pens)
• Avoid scribbling out mistakes. Draw a clear line through a mistake instead. Mistakes are helpful research tools.
• Avoid post-it notes and scrap paper for informal notetaking.
• Avoid cursive. Write in print. Remember, your lab notebook is also a reference to others, which will need easily read by others.
• Don’t get out of a routine. Delaying your entries will cause a major backlog.
• Don’t forget dates and page numbers.

2. Get familiar with your institution’s preferred structuring.

Different organizations have different requirements for how to maintain and organize your lab notebook. For instance, some universities might require the date, page number and the purpose of your entry followed by the methods used and results observed.

When you get started with yours, find out from your principal investigator what their preferences are and look up the standard’s on your institution’s website.

3. Make use of a secondary, unofficial notebook

This third tip comes with caution. Some will regard this as a bad lab practice, so it’s up to your needs and your organization’s requirements.

Due to the formal nature of the official lab notebook and its methodical entry approach, writing well and neatly as you go along can be challenging. Sometimes, this is how the bad habit of writing things on post-it notes or scrap paper with the hopes of future transcription develops.

Instead, use a secondary bound notebook as an informal write-up of your procedures and observations. You can use your secondary notebook in any way that suits you, but the benefit is that it’s an informal place to quickly jot down what you’re doing as you do it. Some people use it to quickly write in any notes about a PCR they’re running, what specific materials they’re using or any specific calculations. You might also enter observations.

If you do this, it’s important to be extremely disciplined in your approach. Everything you enter in your secondary notebook will still need to be entered into your official lab notebook. These entries; however, are going to be written more structured, with neater handwriting and more depth.

When keeping a secondary notebook, there are some things to keep in mind:

• Always date your entries.
• Always head the entry with the same title in your official notebook so that you remember what your informal entries pertained to.
• Transfer the information over daily.
• While your handwriting might not be as neat, be certain you’ll be able to recognize what you wrote a few hours later.

4. Create a wider margin in the pages of your lab notebook for rough documentation and notes.

If you cannot keep a secondary notebook, you might be able to either keep a notes section within each entry, or draw a vertical line down the page, expanding the margin for notes.

Keep in mind, whatever you jot down must be transferred over to the structured portion of your lab notebook in a timely manner. Furthermore, this section can easily get out of hand and feel cluttered depending on how much room you give yourself. Be sure to date each entry, even time stamp it so when you refer back to those notes, you know when you took them and why.

5. Use OMRAD (objective, methods, results and discussion) for your lab notebook structure

One of the challenges of keeping a laboratory notebook is knowing what information to include.

While the advice is to be overly detailed, this can still feel broad. However, if you adhere to a strict OMRAD structure (objective, materials/methods, results and discussion) you’ll already be including a lot of important details.

This advice can still be a little broad seeming, so let’s dive in a little deeper.

• Objective : Here you’re writing the purpose of this procedure. Why are you doing it? What should the outcome be? Why did you choose the method you chose?
• Materials/Methods: Be very detailed here. Include information about the reagents used, including concentrations, volumes and why they were selected (when this is relevant). For the methods, detail what protocols were used and why they were used. If you tailored the protocol, be sure to include the original specifications along with the changes made, and provide information about why you made those changes.

Don’t forget to include very detailed components about your experimental setup such as how many lanes were ran, what samples went into each lane or each tube, what strains were used and why, etc.

What, why and how much are key elements of information in this section.

Additionally, it’s recommended you include any unusual details during your procedure. For instance, you weren’t able to use your personal pipettes or you ran your experiment on a different machine from what you’ve been used to. Or the lab’s temperature was unusually cold. Or perhaps you modified the protocol you were using.These little details will help you troubleshoot if a problem arises, and they also lend to the idea of experimental reproducibility.

Here is a brief list of some things to include in your materials and methods section, and remember to always have detail about why you used each approach when it’s pertinent.

• Results: Here, you’re going to include the objective data. This could be in the form of tables, charts, photos, etc. When using images, you’ll want your pictures clearly labeled. For instance, the samples used in each lane or tube and what the results were. Being detailed about this information will help you later recall how you analyzed your information or why you moved on to the following step.
• Discussion: Summarize your results and its impact in the discussion section (Heroux, n.d.) . This will later become a great tool as you approach your research manuscript.

Include detailed observations in your results section. Some organizations might require your notebook to have an observations section.

In this section you’ll evaluate the results, and explain why you analyzed it the way you did. You’ll also explain whether it accomplished your research objectives, and how and why it did.

The discussion section also paves the way for your next experimental step. Based on the results and their meaning the next logical step is this…

It’s possible that another research question has arisen given the information. The discussion section is your place to detail this as a way of introducing your next step.

Remember that mistakes and failures are also equally important. Perhaps you did a colony screening, but you got no results. You can use the discussion section to explain why you think this happened and what you intend to do next to solve to test this. For example, this might warrant the use of a different antibiotic.

6. Ask your PI for advice

Your PI might provide you with the general standards for keeping your laboratory notebook, but you might want to take a moment to ask specific questions. For instance, if he or she does inspections, what are they looking for? What characteristics have they noticed that lead to good notebook keeping? Can you keep a secondary notebook for scratch work and notes? If not, can you allocate a portion of each notebook entry for informal note taking? Find out if you can include more information beyond what is outlined by your lab’s policy.

7. Schedule time each day for your lab notebook

Some labs might have strict notebook checks, others might not. When strict checks and signoffs aren’t happening, it is easy to fall out of a routine.

There is another hurtle, especially when there is no oversight – it’s easy to get so caught up in the doing that you can’t find time for the writing .

To overcome these obstacles, the best thing to do is to block out a specific time dedicated to daily cleanup and entries in your laboratory notebook.

If you used a secondary notebook for scratch work, it’s time to formalize your day’s entry. If you have an expanded margin with notes, use that time block to organize information into the formal area of your notebook.

This is also a good time to tape in your printed protocols or images of results and clearly write descriptions about these components.

When you have a time block, be strict about this period. When this routine gets broken just once, it’s easy for it to get broken again.

8. Schedule time for review

Reviewing your notes regularly can help you draw better conclusions about your research. It is recommended that you build review time into the same time block as your lab notebook upkeep.

Furthermore, it wouldn’t hurt to hold a weekly review of your lab notebook and notes, especially as you move into other stages of your research.

One of the reasons a regular weekly checkup can help your lab notebook is because a second look can improve comprehension. You might realize that you’re neglecting a very vital piece of information in your regular notebook management. From this review, you now know to include it. The review may help you with an experimental hurtle, or help you think about your experiment in different ways.

9. You can tape and paste typed information

It can get tedious writing down the same experimental steps over and over, but including this information within each entry is extremely important because it allows you to also document any changes made or special circumstances or observations that occurred during the procedure.

Since writing the same steps down over and over will give you a severe hand-cramp, some institutions allow you to print out and tape or glue typed-information into your notebook.

Therefore, if you’re working with the same protocol every day, print out extra copies. Tape it in your notebook and pen-in any changes as you go along. Double-sided tape can also make this task easier.

The same can be said for tables and figures you need to include. Sometimes it’s easier and neater if you have a typed version.

Most institutions will require you to date stamp the printed paper, and this is just good lab practice anyway.

10. Write information down as you go along

Some places will require you to make your notes as you go along, but not all places. Even still, this is a good practice.

One of the biggest benefits to writing everything down as you go along is you will become aware of any issues or missed steps. If your experiment didn’t go as expected, now you have the answer about why.

11. Track your failures and mistakes

The idea of recording your mistakes and failures seems scary, especially when you factor in the cost of reagents.

Despite how frightening it can be to be responsible for waste and get something wrong, record of this information serves as a learning tool . Just the act of writing down that you forgot to add your primers, will make you more careful about that step in the future.

This record will also allow you to see and improve on any procedural weaknesses.

12. Confidently answer these questions with the information in your lab notebook

According to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Department of Mechanical Engineering’s lab notebook requirement , you’re keeping a good lab notebook if you can answer these questions:

• “Can someone else, with an equivalent technical background to your own, use your notebook to repeat your work, and obtain the same results?”
• “Could you come back six months later, read your notes and make sense of them?”

Furthermore, the information recorded should be detailed enough to allow you to also answer these questions:

• Would my reasoning for choosing this experiment justify my methodology to anyone else reading this lab notebook?
• Could you come back in six months and understand why you got the results you got or analyzed the results the way you did?
• Could you come back in six months and fully understand your experimental setup?

13. Keep your research manuscript in mind

Your lab notebook is going to be foundational to your manuscript’s materials and methods, results and discussion sections.

The information you record is going to allow you to flip through and understand what you did, why you did it and how it turned out.

If this is your first research paper or presentation, anticipating exactly what you need before approaching the major writing step is going to be challenging. However, there are some fundamental elements to consider.

• What is my overall research objective?
• What procedures are recorded in my lab notebook that helped me solve this problem?
• Why were those procedures chosen?
• In what order were they conducted?
• Were there any odd observations or special circumstances relevant to the overall results?
• What products and how much did I use?
• What statistical calculations relevant to my paper were used and why?
• What software programs were used, and why?
• What were my observations and results?
• What was the impact of this research?
• What did this answer, and what is left unanswered?

This list could easily grow, but these are at least the initial considerations to help you connect your lab notebook to your research manuscript or presentation.

14. Keep other researchers in mind

Imagine getting to a new lab, and the PI hands you a stack of lab notebooks and says, “Everything you need to know about the project is in here.”

If the notebooks are well-organized, going through them and making sense of them should be relatively easy. But if the notebooks were illegible, poorly structured and poorly detailed, they will be almost useless.

Therefore, when you are approaching your own laboratory notebook, consider future researchers . Give them all the information you would have wanted yourself. Anticipate questions and answer them.

Always make sure if another researcher had your handbook as a manual, they would be able to reproduce exactly the same experiment and get exactly the same result.

If this tip needs to be a little more self-serving, consider collaborators and consultants who might need to refer to your notebooks to work with you. It’s in both of your interests to maintain extremely detailed information.

If that’s not enough, consider yourself the future researcher who might need your lab notebooks. Have you ever reviewed your college notes for a final exam and found some sections impossible to read or missing that one thing the professor said . Future you is also a researcher to keep in mind. Give yourself every tool available for success.

15. Leave extra spaces for routine sections and things you’ve missed.

Because a lab notebook has structure requirements, you might find yourself out of space when you realize you’ve left something out or had more to write than expected.

Anticipate these situations and leave yourself extra room to go back and fill in observations and data you might be waiting on.

In a situation where you didn’t leave yourself enough room, if your institution permits it, include a sort of appendix at the end of each of your entries where these observations and notes can be entered. Make sure to head them appropriately. For instance, if your addition corresponds to your materials section, label the supplemental entry “supplemental materials and methods.” At the bottom of your actual materials section, you might indicate where the supplemental entry can be found “ see page 64 for supplemental materials entry .”

• Your lab notebook is a primary source for your research manuscripts and presentations.
• Regular maintenance and strong record keeping enables your lab notebook to be a valuable manuscript resource.
• Consider the needs of your ultimate research objective and your manuscript when making notebook entries.
• Notebooks not only allow other researchers to accurately replicate your experiment, they also allow you to.
• Excellent record keeping allows your lab notebook to be a useful troubleshooting tool.

Caprette, D. R. (n.d.). Guidelines for Keeping a Laboratory Record. Retrieved May 11, 2020, from https://www.ruf.rice.edu/~bioslabs/tools/notebook/...

Grassie, L. (2020, January 16). 10 Tips For Organizing Your Lab Book. Retrieved May 11, 2020, from https://bitesizebio.com/11068/10-tips-for-organizi...

Heroux, K. (n.d.). How to Turn a Lab Notebook into an Academic Manuscript. Retrieved May 11, 2020, from https://www.aje.com/arc/how-turn-lab-notebook-acad...

Hunter, I. W., & Hughey, B. J. (2007, June 5). MASSACHUSETTS INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY DEPARTMENT OF ... Retrieved May 11, 2020, from http://web.mit.edu/me-ugoffice/communication/labno...

Knox, J. (n.d.). How to use the laboratory notebook correctly. Retrieved May 11, 2020, from http://ainslielab.web.unc.edu/files/2016/06/Lab_No...

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• Electronic Lab Notebooks (ELNs)

Electronic Laboratory Notebooks (ELNs) are software programs that replace paper notebooks.  These digital tools are more secure options that allow researchers to electronically document experiments and observations, collaborate with their teams, templatize protocols, manage inventory, coordinate signatures, etc.  The use of ELNs also support researchers in their effort to comply with the ever-changing data management requirements from sponsors and journals.   

Eligibility information is outlined below based on providers with offerings that are available to the entire Harvard community or a specific unit/appointment. 

University-wide.

Harvard University Information Technology (HUIT)

Electronic Lab Notebooks (ELNs) have become a standard in research labs, and a myriad of products that offer complete lab management solutions are now available across academia and industry. RSpace is a collaborative tool that enables researchers and their teams to work together in a way that is centralized, streamlined, and secure. RSpace offers integrations with other commonly used platforms (e.g. Slack, MS Teams, e-mail, calendar, etc.) that enable efficient lab management of labs, projects, and teams.

RSpace is available to Principal Investigators with a Harvard appointment.  Members of their labs, both researchers and administrators, can be added as users.

Service Provider

Service fee.

$100 per user per year to be paid for by the PI or their School/Department

Service Website

https://harvard.service-now.com/ithelp?id=kb_article&sys_id=d9950c05dbfb681460c0d9fcd39619cf

Contact Information

Contact David Heitmeyer at  [email protected]

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Harvard medical school.

The eLABJournal Electronic Lab Notebook offers an intuitive and flexible solution to document research data. It improves efficiency when documenting, organizing, searching and archiving collected data in research laboratories. eLABJournal also offers tracking of sample collections, management of protocols or SOPs, and centralized lab supply ordering. You can also reserve laboratory instruments, track device validation, and be notified of events in the lab.

eLABJournal keeps a full audit trail of all recorded experiment data, samples, and protocols. Experiments can be signed and counter-signed with electronic signatures in accordance with FDA 21 CPR part 11 guidelines. It also allows researchers to collaborate and share data with colleagues, and enables PIs to keep track of the work being done in their lab.

HMS On-Quad Faculty, Staff and Students

Note: We are currently in the Pilot stage with eLABJournal. Only groups who have been approved by the ELN steering committee will be eligible for participation in the Pilot.

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9 Great Tools to Maintain Lab Notebook for Researchers

You have scheduled a real time PCR to determine your primer efficiency. After thorough planning, you were able to successfully finish the experiment and get the Ct value. As you sit to write the experiment in your journal, you struggle to understand the notes you made while carrying out the experiment. You in fact, did not even write down the dilutions! Without writing the correct requirements and methodology, the results from the experiment aren’t reliable. Then you remember, how your PI had mentioned to note everything you perform in the laboratory as and when possible!

Table of Contents

Why to Maintain and Organize Lab Notebook?

Lab Notebook is one of the most useful  resources for a researcher . Although a mundane job, writing laboratory notes helps researchers gather information and track all the experiments, their results, and failures that are further used for optimization of the experiments. Despite its imperativeness, no researcher ever calls it an interesting job as it involves a lot of writing. This process is like journal completion only much more complicated, as the researcher has to mention each and every detail of the experiment they performed.

Following reasons make lab notes a reliable resource for researchers:

• Maintaining diligent records help researchers understand their results. There are times when the written results don’t make sense because the researchers analyze it after a few days of performing the experiments.
• Detailed note taking helps organize the research work. Furthermore, it helps picking up the work from where it was left.
• Good lab notebook provides written evidence, increase transparency, and lets researchers undergo data analysis ethically.

Researchers who decide to write and publish a paper after a few months or years after performing the experiments rely on the research note, as they ensure reproducibility, which is essential in paper publishing. Furthermore, details from lab notebook help researchers write the procedures and results with accuracy.

 Types of Laboratory Notes

Type of information a researcher documents in the journal, defines the type of laboratory notes. In a research project, research notes are of various forms like – literature report, experiment planning, timelines of experiments, raw data, requirements, procedures, statistical data, flowcharts, observational images and references, etc. The challenge lies in keeping a track of all the information documented based on these types. But, this task is not as challenging as it initially looks, because it takes discipline to maintain and organize various types of notes with good lab practices and healthy habit of notetaking.

Digital Lab Notebook – Simplifies or Complicates a Researcher’s Life?

Maintaining lab notebook is a discipline. Every researcher must inculcate the habit of taking notes from the experiments they have performed to the events they have planned for their project. However, Students in their early days of career are comfortable with taking notes because they are a mandate to acquire grades. However, with time and increasing  responsibilities of the project , students/researchers tend to miss out on taking notes regularly.

As mentioned earlier, making research notes can sometimes take longer than the actual duration of the experiment!

new lucrative applications are used to mitigate the trouble of spending long hours in making lab notebook.

Earlier, documenting data was a time consuming process. Digital applications or electronic lab notebooks improve time management of documenting project data. Unlike the pen and paper notes, digital lab notebooks are easily accessible and searchable. Retrieving data from the pile of raw data is an easy task in digital documentation. Moreover, there are applications which can organize data and help researchers set reminders for further planned experiments. There are apps that give complete overview of the project work and how to plan the project tasks in advance.

There are people who prefer writing their lab notes on paper over using the digital platform. Although a personalized exercise, writing on paper is a time consuming process. Over time research scholars who prefer hand written notes may have to adapt to electronic lab notebook and applications. There is no However, with growing pace of research and the race to  publish first , it is better to incorporate smarter tools to work with instead of perishing with knowledge worth publishing!

9 Great Tools to maintain Lab Notebook

Labguru web service and mobile application lets researchers plan, record, assess, and share information the entire day. Researchers can photograph and share experimental results, use whiteboard drawings, access conference posters, or visual notes for related steps in an experiment.

Notion organizes documents, databases, audio-visual content, notes, meetings, and schedules.

3. CloningBench

This application is specific for the biology field of research. CloningBench helps and guides researchers through important decisions in cloning research. It includes features like molar quantities calculator, gene size estimator, bacterial growth timer, etc.

4. PubChase

PubChase gives latest updates in biomedical publication. Furthermore, researchers can search through literature database and save interesting articles to read later.

5. Cell Imaging HD

This app allows researchers to find and visualize reagents, fluorescent dyes, and protocols. Furthermore, Cell Imaging HD is designed for research related to cell biology and major microscope systems.

It is used for calculations and unit conversions which are extensively used in designing various quantitative experiments. PCalc is one of the highest rated scientific apps.

7. Hivebench

Hivebench is a substitute for paper notebooks and specifically designed for lab research. Researchers can be more detailed, organized, and precise in their research project.

It is a quick reference tool. It looks up the genes used quite often in medical research. Scientists can get complete details about the genes appearing in relevant publication.

9. ResearchKit

It is an open source platform, allowing scientists to build customized application for their studies. This app allows to gather participant data. Researchers can look through the app and appoint suitable individuals for varied research roles. Moreover, this app works like LinkedIn, but specific to the research field.

Have you used any of the tools mentioned above? Did you like these tools and their interface? Tell us if you have used some  other innovative tools  and share with us your experience of using them. If you find this information interesting and want to explore the hacks for becoming a productive and efficient researcher, do write to us or leave a comment below!

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LabArchives: Best practices for research data management

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About LabArchives

The University of Michigan is providing an Electronic Research Notebook (ERN)  for all faculty, students and staff. The ERN provides a secure and compliant replacement for traditional paper lab notebooks, and allows researchers to enjoy the benefits, efficiencies, and long-term cost savings of centralized, paperless data storage. It also aids in lab management, protects intellectual property, facilitates secure collaboration, and offers simple sample tracking.

For more information:

Electronic Research Notebook: ern.umich.edu

Create your account

Access the ERN using your level-1 login credentials and DUO authentication. To create your account, start at ern.umich.edu . Once you've established your account, you can either create notebooks  or access notebooks to which you've been added.

Customizing settings

To customize notebook settings, click the menu option at the far right of the toolbar, and select Notebook settings. From here, you can determine the placement for new entries, turn on commenting features and set your page signing preferences (signing certifies the final version of an entry, page or notebook). 

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LabArchives

Create your account:

• Click on Get Started
• Fill out the form - make sure to use your @uci.edu email and include your institution.
• Sign in - using University of California, Irvine as the institution in Single Sign-On

For more information: https://edtechtools.eee.uci.edu/labarchives-eln/  

Anaconda - Jupyter Notebooks

Download: https://www.anaconda.com/

Laboratory Notebooks

Lab notebooks, whether in print or electronic form (ELN), are a critical component of tracking and recording research. Consistent documentation of your research methods, calculations, and results is important not only for your personal use, but will help when you publish or otherwise share research, and when others want to reproduce what you have done.

Benefits of an ELN

Benefits of using an ELN:

• Instantly searchable documents by a tag or a keyword, saving time
• Enables real-time data sharing with collaborators
• Better oversight of laboratory work by lab PI 
• Preservation of experimental procedures and protocols for future use 
• Enables download and storage of large data sets
• Eliminates legibility issues related to a paper notebook
• Facilitates reproducibility of research

What can be stored

What can be stored in an ELN?

• Experimental protocols, data, results. 
• Data from instruments, analysis, graphs
• Email Communication, and discussions with peers, PI
• Inventory management
• Apparatus Documentation

Selecting an ELN

There is no “one-size-fits-all” electronic research notebook. Your lab will need to consider a number of different factors before selecting the ELN platform that best meets your needs. These factors include:

• The type of science that you do and the specific features that you need
• Your lab’s established practices and preferences
• Your institution’s ELN policies
• The security level of your data
• Your budget

Useful Links

• Electronic Lab Notebook Best Practices Electronic lab notebooks (ELN) tout themselves as productivity tools for life sciences researchers. Some ELNs are targeted to academic researchers, and some are for use in regulated industries like biotech startups. Electronic lab notebooks can be both a tremendous boon to a researcher's productivity and a fantastic way for organizations to manage a seamless digital workflow for laboratory information.
• Instructions for Using Your Laboratory Notebook Keeping a complete and accurate record of experimental methods and data is a vital part of science and engineering. Your laboratory notebook is a permanent record of what you did and what you observed in the laboratory.
• NIH - Keeping a Lab Notebook Intended to be a first step in understanding the basic principles and some of the best practices for keeping a sound scientific notebook.

protocols.io

Protocols.io is an open access platform for the creation and sharing of detailed methods and protocols. Features of protocols.io include:

• Share methods before, during and after publication
• Citable; add DOI to manuscripts 
• Versioning: protocols can be kept up-to-date
• Run protocols step-by-step in a browser or mobile
• Open access platform
• Forking, versioning, and commenting features
• Archived in CLOCKSS

UC researchers currently have free access to Premium accounts during the pilot period (May 31, 2024). Premium features include private collaboration around method development and use in classrooms. In the long term, this initiative should also increase the reproducibility and rigor of the research published by UC academics. Use your UCI email when logging in to access these features.

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Electronic Research Notebooks

Cedars-Sinai offers the Electronic Research Notebook (ERN) services of LabArchives, a secure, cloud-based solution for research data management.

Open to all Cedars-Sinai basic, translational and clinical researchers at any level, ERN services are provided at no cost to you and can help you organize, store, export and share your research data.

Users will also have access to Inventory, a LabArchives inventory management module to organize storage and track usage of lab items, and to help organize requests for ordering.

Getting Started

Go to: mynotebook.labarchives.com

• Enter your primary Cedars-Sinai email address (e.g. [email protected]) or select ' Cedars-Sinai Medical Center' from the drop-down menu.
• On the linked page, enter your standard Cedars-Sinai credentials.
• Logging into LabArchives off-site requires Okta Multi-Factor Authentication via the 'Okta Verify' app on your mobile device.

Help & Support

Secure, cloud-based searchable data, accessible anywhere and platform-independent. Long-term storage that replaces paper notebooks that take up space and are susceptible to loss. Ability to easily share data and protocols with others, within or outside Cedars-Sinai . Trains students and postdocs on modern electronic record-keeping. IP protection and research integrity data trail (all entries are time-stamped, nothing ever deleted).

No. ERNs are tools for documenting any research process and may be useful for keeping track of workflows and data from clinical trials or other non-wetlab based research.

With the generous support of Cedars-Sinai Academic Affairs, there is no cost to individual investigators and no limit on the number of notebooks you can create.

Starting in mid-2019, Cedars-Sinai entered a 3-year contract with LabArchives. While we cannot predict the future of any software, Cedars-Sinai is committed to maintaining ERNs in some form. If the LabArchives contract is terminated for any reason, LabArchives agrees to maintain all of the Cedars-Sinai data in a 'read-only' format and allow users to export the data for a period of 3 years from the date the subscription terminates. The data remains the sole and exclusive property of Cedars-Sinai .  

See the definitions here: User Roles . Note, when lab members create notebooks, it is Cedars-Sinai policy that ownership of the notebook be transferred to the lab PI (the person who created the notebook will then be converted to administrator).

Notebook Entries

Any electronic data can be uploaded to your notebook (Word documents, Excel sheets, PDFs, text files, image files, etc.). Apps allow specific integration with Microsoft Office, GraphPad Prism, and other Software Integration Partners . 

Yes. Select 'PubMed References' on the Add Entry toolbar (under 'More' if not visible). Enter a search term and click 'Search'. The matching references will appear. Check the box for each article you would like to reference and click 'Add to entry'.

LabArchives integrates with BOX so you can drag and drop files >250MB to a notebook, and these will be stored in a common Cedars-Sinai BOX account (the file icon will indicate a BOX file). Note that you can only access your files uploaded to this BOX account via the LabArchives interface. The maximum size for a single file is currently 15 GB. However, you can also insert a link to another server outside of a notebook for larger files. The maximum single notebook size is 1 TB. However, you may create as many notebooks as you wish.

Some groups will add data to the notebook periodically (weekly, daily, etc.) rather than recording data in the lab notebook immediately. You might also setup Folder Monitor to automatically upload data from a local drive ( Folder Monitor Mac ) ( Folder Monitor Windows ). Alternatively, you can email the data files to  [email protected]  from the Cedars-Sinai email account associated with your LabArchives account ( Inbox ). Data sent to the inbox will appear in your LabArchives inbox with the body of the email text appearing as a description. When ready, simply move the data to the appropriate notebook page.

Yes, but only 1-way and not from a shared drive or directly from BOX (although you can manually upload from these sources). The downloaded application Folder Monitor will allow you to automatically upload data to your lab notebook from a drive on your computer or piece of equipment in the lab. See Folder Monitor for Mac ( Folder Monitor Mac ) or Windows ( Folder Monitor Windows ).

Absolutely! Many groups create templates for repetitive techniques to standardize the associated documentation. You can design a template with rich text entries, attachments or you can create your own custom Widget ( Widgets ). Widgets use HTML forms and Javascript code and can make standardized forms that a researcher fills out when performing a particular task (calculator tools, freezer inventories, plasmid databases, etc.). Also see Widget Manager .

There are Microsoft Office plugins for Mac and Windows that function with Office 365, allowing integration of LabArchives with Word, Excel and PowerPoint. Once installed, you can select "Open," "Save As," "Log in," or "Detach" all within Word, Excel or PowerPoint. 

Portability

Yes, you can export either the entire notebook or any portion as a PDF. You can also choose to create an offline notebook, which creates a zip drive with HTML files for the pages in the ERN and includes the attachments. Remember, all current institutional policies that apply to paper notebooks and data generated at Cedars-Sinai apply to ERNs. The data remains the sole and exclusive property of Cedars-Sinai .  

Security and Access

As the owner of the lab notebook, you have full administrative control, including what is shared and with whom and what they are allowed to view and edit within your notebook. You can maintain both private and collaborative information within your LabArchives account. Any current institutional policies that apply to paper notebooks and data generated at Cedars-Sinai apply to ERNs.

Yes. Cedars-Sinai has a BAA in place with LabArchives. LabArchives provides the framework to support best practices research at Cedars-Sinai in accordance with the stated objectives of the Office of Research and IT in addition to the National Science Foundation, National Institutes of Health and other government-funding agencies' mandates requiring data management plans with clear post-publication data-sharing plans. LabArchives provides the framework for compliance with these mandates as well as 21 CFR Part 11, HIPAA, FERPA, GDPR, GLP and NIST 800-171. LabArchives has also passed a Cedars-Sinai security review and is integrated with OKTA and our active directory. 

To access your data in LabArchives, you will need a constant internet connection. LabArchives guarantees that you will be able to access your data 99.5% of the time, and its historical record is quite good. But should you not be able to access your notebook for a short period, written or computer-entered records would need to be subsequently uploaded (the former can be as simple as a cellphone picture of notes). If a grant or paper deadline absolutely requires access to a notebook, it would be prudent to download a PDF or other form of the relevant data for short-term local storage.  

Yes. LabArchives functions within the browser on most mobile devices and there are also Android and iOS apps.  

Collaboration

ERNs make collaboration easy, with the ability to set permissions at the level of notebook, page or individual entry; share notebooks, pages or individual entries with your Cedars-Sinai lab members, colleagues or collaborators outside Cedars-Sinai ; and the ability to create a protocol compendium used by everyone in the lab or even shared outside the lab.

No. Like ERNs, Inventory is provided free to all Cedars-Sinai personnel.

LabArchives Inventory is accessible from your LabArchives ERN account by clicking on the test-tube icon in the upper right-hand corner of the notebook or by logging in directly at inventory.labarchives.com . If you already have a LabArchives ERN account, you do not need to create a new account and will have the ability to switch between the two.

Yes. There is an import template to upload your inventory information. It is organized by Inventory Type which can be customized in the Lab Management section of Inventory.

Yes. Inventory items and orders can be searched and filtered as well as exported for reporting and ordering purposes.

• Inventory Types: There are nine default types to categorize inventory items, but you can modify to match the types used in your lab. You can customize the details fields for the defaults, delete the ones that aren’t relevant (with the exception of the General and Chemical type), and create your own new types.
• Storage: You can create a multilevel representation of your storage locations so that you can view items from multiple perspectives. You can even set up a Freezer Box and then populate the Freezer Box in Inventory to match up with its current physical inventory.

It is Cedars-Sinai policy that PIs are owners of all ERNs created by lab personnel. Similarly, PIs should be assigned a lab manager role in Inventory. However, there is no limit on the number of people who can have the lab manager role. Typically, a lab manager or similar position, as well as the PI, will be assigned a lab manager role, while others may be assigned lab member roles, but that is up to you.

No. Inventory allows for approval (if desired) and organization of order requests from the lab. These requests can then be exported as a “shopping list” to enter into the PeopleSoft ordering system.

The Inventory program has been designed to be mobile friendly. From your mobile device’s browser, you can scan QR codes you’ve generated from the program. Simply select the camera icon near the search window on the Inventory menu to scan.

Currently, the DYMO LabelWriter is supported along with cryo-label (DTCR 9138-6000), which includes a circular QR code and separate label. Expanding the list of supported printers and allowing for custom formatting is being planned for a future release.

Access and Support

Already have an account with Cedars-Sinai LabArchives? Log in below to begin.

Google Colaboratory

Colab is a hosted Jupyter Notebook service that requires no setup to use and provides free access to computing resources, including GPUs and TPUs. Colab is especially well suited to machine learning, data science, and education.

News and Guidance

Features, updates, and best practices

Browse Notebooks

Check out our catalog of sample notebooks illustrating the power and flexiblity of Colab.

Track changes

Read about product updates, feature additions, bug fixes and other release details.

Dive deeper

Check out these resources to learn more about Colab and its ever-expanding ecosystem.

Effective lab data management: Advancing scientific research (Part 1)

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The substantial volume of data collected and analyzed by modern laboratories - irrespective of their sector - means that effective lab data management has never been so important. In this context, laboratory data management can be understood as the storage and organization of scientific data.

Image Credit: Gorodenkoff/Shutterstock.com

Inadequate data management processes can lead to siloed data, and even traditional informatics solutions such as Laboratory Information Management System (LIMS) systems (or LIS) and Electronic Lab Notebooks (ELN)  can result in data inefficiencies in many scenarios.

This article explores the use of on-premise or cloud-based lab data management solutions. It discusses the precise definition of lab data management and why it is so important. It also summarizes the key software functionality required to successfully achieve effective, real-time laboratory data management.

Defining lab data management

Lab data management methodically handles and organizes the wide range of data generated in a typical laboratory environment. It incorporates automated data collection and storage, validation processes, metadata management, quality control, validation, metrics, and decision-making processes.

Any laboratory setting contains diverse data sources, and appropriate laboratory data management and operating procedures are vital in preventing these data sources from being siloed.

Siloed systems pose several challenges, such as inefficiencies and issues accessing existing data, inadequate cross-referencing capability across data sources, and disjointed insights where it is impossible to effectively combine data sources.

The importance of effective lab data management

Effective lab data management in healthcare and life sciences laboratories is especially key because this ensures that critical data collection remains reliable, accurate, and accessible.

Integrating a centralized data management system into existing laboratory operations makes data more readily accessible, enabling researchers to retrieve, analyze, and compare relevant data rapidly.

By incorporating data from various sources into a centralized data management system, researchers are afforded a more comprehensive and holistic overview of their research projects - a key consideration for any researcher looking to maximize the usefulness of their data.

These capabilities continue to expand as AI technology advances, with researchers now able to feed their data into AI tools to reduce the time spent analyzing the data or conducting other routine tasks.

Effective laboratory data management improves efficiency and ensures operational scalability. It may even act as a catalyst for innovation and continued scientific development.

Leveraging effective lab data management to enhance scientific research outcomes

Effective lab data management notably enhances scientific research outcomes because data collection is consistently accurate, reliable, and accessible.

Accurate, accessible data allows researchers to effortlessly retrieve, analyze, and compare data as required, driving discovery and improving reproducibility. Integrating data from different sources helps researchers develop a more comprehensive understanding of their research, enabling more profound insights and conclusions with added impact.

Centralized data management systems are also key to fostering scientific collaboration, enabling efficient knowledge sharing and streamlined interdisciplinary research. These benefits contribute to scientific advancements.

Improving management of laboratory data

Lab data collection and management have evolved from traditional paper-based methods to digital systems such as LIMS and ELN. However, the practice of lab data management is still primarily siloed.

This siloing of scientific data stems from laboratories working with multiple unintegrated data management systems, such as separate LIMS and ELNs.

Scientific information is held across various systems in these laboratories, presenting several issues regarding retrieving and utilizing this data. Siloed systems also pose several problems for users looking to cross-examine their data.

A contemporary scientific approach to data system integration is essential for implementing and maintaining an effective laboratory data management system.

Sapio Jarvis from Sapio Sciences is a powerful solution that allows users to connect and collect their entire range of data from systems such as ELNs and LIMS into a single platform.

Not only does Sapio Jarvis centralize collected data, but it can also automate data parsing, processing, and sending it to experiments and additional workflows using natural language rules.

Integrating existing data sources with a robust tool like Sapio Jarvis vastly improves lab data management and further contextualizes research projects.

This article examined the importance of lab data management , a concept understood as the systematic storage, analysis, and sharing of a wide range of data generated in a laboratory.

By ensuring effective laboratory data management, researchers can be confident that data collection is reliable, accurate, and accessible. This improves laboratory processes and enhances productivity, allowing for more contextualized data analysis.

Sapio Jarvis is a code-free data integration solution that empowers laboratories to incorporate unified integration, collaboration, and data management into their operations.

The platform seamlessly integrates data from various existing data sources, such as LIMS and ELN software, providing users with comprehensive insight into their scientific data.

Read part 2 of Effective lab data management: Advancing scientific research here .

About sapio sciences.

Sapio Sciences ' mission is to improve lives by accelerating discovery, and because science is complex, Sapio makes technology simple. Sapio is a global business offering an all-in-one science-aware (TM) lab informatics platform combining cloud-based LIMS, ELN, and Jarvis data solutions.

Sapio serves some of the largest global and specialist brands, including biopharma, CRO/CDMOs and clinical diagnostic labs across NGS genomic sequencing, bioanalysis, bioprocessing, stability, clinical, histopathology, drug research, and in vivo studies. Customers love Sapio's platform because it is robust, scalable, and with no-code configuration, can quickly adapt to meet unique needs.

Sponsored Content Policy: News-Medical.net publishes articles and related content that may be derived from sources where we have existing commercial relationships, provided such content adds value to the core editorial ethos of News-Medical.Net which is to educate and inform site visitors interested in medical research, science, medical devices and treatments.

Last updated: Aug 12, 2024 at 8:04 AM

Please use one of the following formats to cite this article in your essay, paper or report:

Sapio Sciences. (2024, August 12). Effective lab data management: Advancing scientific research (Part 1). News-Medical. Retrieved on August 15, 2024 from https://www.news-medical.net/whitepaper/20240812/Effective-lab-data-management-Enhancing-efficiency-and-scientific-outcomes.aspx.

Sapio Sciences. "Effective lab data management: Advancing scientific research (Part 1)". News-Medical . 15 August 2024. <https://www.news-medical.net/whitepaper/20240812/Effective-lab-data-management-Enhancing-efficiency-and-scientific-outcomes.aspx>.

Sapio Sciences. "Effective lab data management: Advancing scientific research (Part 1)". News-Medical. https://www.news-medical.net/whitepaper/20240812/Effective-lab-data-management-Enhancing-efficiency-and-scientific-outcomes.aspx. (accessed August 15, 2024).

Sapio Sciences. 2024. Effective lab data management: Advancing scientific research (Part 1) . News-Medical, viewed 15 August 2024, https://www.news-medical.net/whitepaper/20240812/Effective-lab-data-management-Enhancing-efficiency-and-scientific-outcomes.aspx.

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