Keeping a lab 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. Learning to keep a good notebook now will establish good habits that will serve you throughout your career. Your notebook should be like a diary, recording what you do, and why you did it. You should feel free to record your mistakes and difficulties performing the experiment - you will frequently learn more from these failures, and your attempts to correct them, than from an experiment that works perfectly the first time. It is extremely important that your notebook accurately record everything you did. A good test of your work is the following question could someone else, with an equivalent technical background to your own, use your notebook to repeat your work, and obtain the same results? For that matter, could you come back six months later, read your notes, and make sense of them? If you can answer yes to these two questions, you are keeping a good notebook.
A lab notebook includes..
- Detailed account of every planned and executed experiment with the amount of detail that would enable a scientist “skilled in the art” to determine what had been done, why it had been done, and what the results were dates accompanying every entry, account, or record
- Protocols, reagents, lot numbers in each entry, and where appropriate, sketches, descriptions, and so on explanations of the significance of each experiment, as well as the observations, results and conclusions of the experiment details of each experiment (Remember, what may seem trivial or obvious at the time your experiment was conducted, may later be of critical importance.)
- Personal comments (It is a living document, so stamp it with your own personality. Comments such as “SUCCESS AT LAST!! THIRD TIME LUCKY)” are highly appropriate. However, do not make sweeping statements, such as, “This procedure is worthless” or “We infringe X’s patent with this procedure.” Statements like this could affect the future patentability of your research.
- Photographs, computer generated data, and so forth should all be included.
A lab notebook is not…
A common misunderstanding about a lab notebook is that it is a journal for your scientific or personal musings. It is not. There is a difference between recording a hypothesis to be tested by a specific experiment and writing down ideas about how things might work. Thinking about the possible directions of your research and theorizing about how a system works is often how scientific breakthroughs are made.
However, these thoughts and ideas should not be kept in your lab notebook. Likewise, your lab notebook is not where you should keep a record of conversations or communications you have with your boss or labmates.
Your lab notebook is also not the place to copy or store protocols from commercial product manuals. By documenting the company and product, you can reference the manual in your procedures.