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Advanced Recordkeeping
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- Findings 2 0 3 – Lab Notebook App For Scientists Use
- Findings 2 0 3 – Lab Notebook App For Scientists Work
- Findings 2 0 3 – Lab Notebook App For Scientists Using
- Findings 2 0 3 – Lab Notebook App For Scientists Predict
Journals and log books are used by researchers and writers in almost every field.
- To make note of 'what we do as we do it,' we keep a record.
- To ensure we don't forget what happened on this day, we jot down a quick note.
- To remind ourselves later of the affect of this agent on that substance, we document.
A quick look at samples from the over 13,000 pages recorded (often in reverse, mirror-image cursive) by Leonardo Da Vinci shows the range of materials that can appear in a notebook - and the ways in which such notes can later be referenced to track a project or idea. A good journal or lab notebook becomes a historical reference for projects and can help shape future research.
JupyterLab HTML. This extension allow you to render HTML file inside of Jupyter Lab, which is can be useful when you need to open for example d3 visualization. 588 Appendix B Table B-1 Hematology Non-pregnant adulta First trimester Second trimester Third trimester Erythropoietinb (U/L) 4–27 12–25 8–67 14–222 Ferritinb (ng/mL) 10–150d 6–130 2–230 0–116. A laboratory notebook is an important tool that goes well beyond research management and can have important implications for issues ranging from intellectual property management to the prevention of fraud. This chapter discusses the key elements of a laboratory notebook, types of notebooks, what should be included in the notebook, ownership issues, archiving, and security. Explore molecule shapes by building molecules in 3D! How does molecule shape change with different numbers of bonds and electron pairs? Find out by adding single, double or triple bonds and lone pairs to the central atom. Then, compare the model to real molecules! Since 1984, DivBio has been easing the burden of researchers worldwide with innovative products and labeling solutions such as Cryo-Babies®, Cryo-Tags®, Tough-Tags and Tough-Spots.
No matter what size project you are working on, you want to make a habit of keeping good records. If treated properly and used diligently, a lab notebook can make a big difference in the process of putting together a final project, a report, or a presentation on results.
When you sit down to write up your project , it will be much easier and less time-consuming if you have thorough and detailed notes of every stage of the process rather than relying on your 'memory' of what happened at various points along the way.
Every project differs, so how you approach setting up your book will have a lot to do with your specific project, what kinds of lab-testing you are doing, how many trials you are running, how frequently you measure and collect your data, and even what kinds of background research you are conducting.
There are, however, tried and true practices that can make a difference in how useful your lab notebook is when you get ready to right up your project.
The team of scientists at Science Buddies put together the following set of tips and tricks for using and keeping a lab notebook.
Picking a notebook:
- No sticky notes! A pile of loose paper or sticky notes won't work for a lab notebook. Use a good quality 'bound' notebook, so that pages can't be lost, shuffled out of order, or pulled loose.
- Page numbers help. Use a notebook with pre-numbered pages or number the pages yourself. This allows you to easily reference data on other pages via page number.
Tip: Before you start writing in a new lab notebook, go through and number all pages in a consistent location (the top right-hand corner, for example).
Organizing your notebook:
- Claim your book. Put your name, address, phone, email, or other contact information on the first page. It does happen that notebooks and journals get dropped, accidentally left behind, or lost. A lost lab notebook can be frustrating and can really set your project behind. If you've included your contact information, the person who finds your lab notebook can contact you to give it back.
- Organize as you go. Label the second page of your notebook 'Table of Contents.' As you make entries in your lab notebook, write the page numbers and a description of the experiment or data in the table of contents for easy reference later.
- Neatness counts. All entries should be neat, legible, and complete. Many times you will have to refer back to data that you recorded a while ago. You do not want to be confused by what you wrote because you were in a hurry and made a sloppy entry.
- Keep it in order. Be sure and date each entry you make in your notebook. The entries should be sequential, but dating entries is standard practice.
- Beware the smear! Use a smudge-proof pen when making entries. If you make a mistake in your notebook, simply cross it out and initial below the crossed out section.
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Findings 2 0 3 – Lab Notebook App For Scientists Use
- It all counts! Your lab notebook is like a science diary. Write down all of your hypotheses, questions to look up later, and background research. As you are working, write down all your experimental observations or thoughts, no matter how small or insignificant they may seem to you at the time. The little detail you don't record might be exactly what you need to know later -- or what will help you answer a teacher or science fair judge's question!
- Who said that? Write down the names, phone numbers, or email addresses of people you have contacted for your experiment.
- Never leave home without it. Always have your notebook with you when doing your experiments.
- Start fresh. Open your notebook to a blank page before you start experimenting during each new lab session. You do not want to start an experiment and then have to stop because you have nowhere to record data.
- A picture can be worth a 1000 words. Draw pictures of your experimental set-up, experimental results, and so on in your notebook. You can also take photographs and paste them in your notebook.
- Include the extras. You can add printouts and other documentation. Just remember to tape or glue in the material in the proper chronological location. Tip: Add notes describing the attached data so it is clear later 'why' you've included the material.
- Don't wait. Record data right away in your lab notebook. Don't rely on your memory because you can forget what happened when you performed the experiment.
- Only in the notebook! Don't be tempted to record data anywhere else but in your lab notebook. Scraps of paper can be lost along with important data.
- Be thorough. Include enough information about what you are doing so that you, or someone else, could reproduce your procedure.
- Add it up. Whether you are figuring out how much of a reagent to add or analyzing your data, make sure to do all your math calculations in your lab notebook. This way if something goes wrong later, you can go back and double check to see if you made a simple arithmetic error.
- Don't jump around. If you need to skip pages between entries for a project, add notes saying where the next entry can be found and where the previous entry occurs.
- Track edits. If you need to go back to a page to change or correct something, use a different colored ink and initial and date the changes.
Findings 2 0 3 – Lab Notebook App For Scientists Work
Special thanks to Sandra, Michelle, Kristin, and Dave for helping pull together their best tips and tricks for using a lab notebook!
Findings 2 0 3 – Lab Notebook App For Scientists Using
Advanced Recordkeeping
Want one more tip that professional researchers and scientists use? Do not leave large parts of pages blank. If part of a page is blank, you might be tempted to scrawl an unrelated note in the blank space later (or someone else might pick up your notebook and make a note in a blank space). When you finish taking notes during a lab session or after recording data on a given day, draw a diagonal line through the unused portion of the page. This clearly marks any 'unused' sections. You'll know later that no data or notes should appear in those spaces as you review your work.
Share Your Tips!
Do you have favorite tricks of your own? Leave a comment to share your favorite lab notebook practices so that others can take advantage of what you're doing right!
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Are you maintaining a lab notebook or a journal? Have you given up on it? Or do you sometimes wonder if the hassles really are worth the supposed payoffs? Do you wish you could do a better job at it? In this post, I'll go over all the benefits of a lab notebook. It turns out, there are a lot! I will then explain how Findings can help you reap these benefits with very little work, maybe even having fun in the process.
Minutes, years and everything in between
The lab notebook is a fascinating tool because it is useful at very different time scales. In fact, one of the challenges of keeping good records is to make it work at all these different levels.
Days
A lab notebook is where you write what your day-to-day activity, as you do it. This has instant benefits. Your notes help you keep track of your current task, whether it's an experiment at the bench, a computational run, a new theory, a bibliographic research, etc. Your lab journal then acts as a memory aid and a daily activity guide.It helps you answer questions about the immediate past and future:which reagent do I need to add, where are the computation results stored, when did I start this incubation,..?
Weeks
Crucially, the content of your lab notebook continues to be useful days and weeks after you wrote things down. You may need to repeat a procedure, check where you stored some samples, or remember this brilliant idea you had a month ago. Your lab notebook becomes a project management tool, linking together multiple experiments, including both the 'why' and the 'how' it was done. As weeks go by, the details of your work fade from memory, but your lab notebook keeps everything connected and consistent.
Months
Beyond a few weeks, your notebook starts to also be useful to others. First, a well-maintained lab notebook is an invaluable resource when comes the time to publish your work. It brings together the experimental details, the observations you made and the raw data you generated. In addition, your lab notebook becomes a reference to reproduce and re-use your work. Your results becomes the basis of new projects and new research directions, and some details buried in your lab notebook may become critical to you or collaborators. Hopefully, it's in there!
Years
Once your work is published and you have moved on to new projects, maybe even to a new place, your lab notebook still has a role to play. The first has to do with accountability: your lab notebook is a way to audit your contribution to a project or a publication; it gives your work some 'tracability'. With all the recent debates around scientific fraud and reproducibility, many institutions are paying a lot of attention (and money) to this concept.
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Findings 2 0 3 – Lab Notebook App For Scientists Predict
Then of course, there is the issue of intellectual property. The recent move from 'first to invent' to 'first to file' in the US has reduced the importance of lab notebook for patents, but it still has an important role to play, in particular in establishing ownership of inventions and processes.
The perfect notebook
The above should make it clear that producing the perfect lab notebook is a very challenging task. Your notes should have all the details of what you did, when (and maybe where), including the list of the inputs and reagents you used, as well as any unusual details. It should also clearly link the steps you followed to the results you obtained, with an unambiguous way to get to the raw data if needed. Your lab notebook should include the processed results, the conclusions you draw from them, and how that relates to previous results and your project. Connections between experiments, ideas you have, directions you take: everything should be included, verified, dated, signed, and readable by your future self, any present and future colleague, and posterity.
But here is the kicker: most of the content of a lab notebook will not be looked at again. Ever. What makes it worthwhile are the unpredictable 2% (give or take) that turn out to be really really useful.
Findings to the rescue!
When designing Findings, we had 3 simple ideas to make it possible (and even easy) to create a perfect lab notebook:
- Provide instant benefits that make it useful for your daily work.
- Make it easy and fun to use.
- Provide long-term benefits without any additional work.
Points 1 and 2 is what defines Findings as a productivity app. Findings makes you more productive and efficient: you end up doing more than before, in less time, and with more enjoyment. If we do a good job at it, you'll be hooked.
Point 3 is where the magic happens. Without you even realizing, the small amount of work you put every day in Findings is also an investement in the future. All the long-term benefits of a well-maintained lab notebook will be ready for you to reap when the time comes. If we do a good job at that part, you'll soon be worshipped by your colleagues and peers.
Let's go over the features that allow Findings to perform its magic..
The Experimental Narrative
Experiments form the foundations of Findings. They give a context to your daily work and connect your tasks over multiple days. They make it easier to switch between projects without losing track of your different activities. That's a benefit you can very quickly feel when using Findings.
Thinking in terms of experiments also naturally lead you to better plan your work and to place each experiment in the larger context of a research project. Findings invites you to optionally add some simple metadata: title, aims, rating. The few minutes you may spend on this will help you answer simple questions about your work: what question am I trying to answer, what do I know so far, should I explore this result more? You'll naturally follow the 'experiment narrative': hypothesis, experiment, conclusion, hypothesis. Importantly, all of this happens naturally (and when it does not make sense, there is nothing forcing you to follow any predefined rigid structure). Over time, the benefits will add up.
Protocols and Notes: the devil is in the details
Protocols in Findings are useful to write down experimental details that you keep repeating.In fact, a better name for protocols could be 'templates' (but that's for another blog post!). You can use Findings without protocols, but using them is very easy: you just drag them inside an experiment using the calendar view. Once inserted, the content of the protocol is a copy of the original, that can be modified as needed to accomodate the small changes you may make to the procedure. Findings makes it very easy to include all the details that may make a difference when you look at an experiment again, months later.
For more unusual events, you can also insert notes, wherever it's needed, and in the right context.
Attachments
One of the biggest strength of Findings, and also one easy to overlook, is the ability to insert any file, directly where they belong, within the experiment that produced it. The first benefit is straightforward: you will never lose that file, because it is stored for you by Findings, within your library, in a place that nothing else will disturb. All you need to worry about is backing up your computer. But even more importantly, you will never wonder what it is, because it is surrounded by all the experimental details and notes that help produce the results within it. You do not need to worry how to name it, or where it is stored. You just need to focus on writing the right amount of detail to annotate its contents.
History of Changes
Behind the scenes, Findings is keeping a full history of your changes with the corresponding timestamps. This is part of the open-source file format we use, called PARStore, which you can check out on github.This history is not exposed yet in the user interface, but it's something we will integrate in a future version. The data is there, though, and will provide an official audit trail that you are already building without you having to do anything for it.
And more..
I have only highlighted here some of the most important aspects of Findings, and this post is already too long. There are many other elements of Findings that conspire to build long-term benefits into your electronic lab notebook. There are also many more features coming that will help you leverage those benefits. If you have not already, be sure to sign up to our mailing list to be notified about new features and major updates (we typically send an email every 1-2 months). You can also follow @findingsapp on Twitter or our Facebook page. And feel free to let me know if you have more thoughts on lab notebooks or on how we can further improve the app by sending an email [email protected].
Here is hoping I have inspired you to take on new resolutions for your lab notebook in 2015. The good news is: with Findings, it's never been easier to get it right!