Purrington, C. B., Maintaining a laboratory notebook
http://colinpurrington.com/tips/academic/labnotebooks

Retrieved 2011-12-05

 

Writing the Laboratory Notebook

Howard M. Kanare

1985, American Chemical Society, Washington, DC

ISBN 0-8412-0906-5

 

Therefore not a lot will be repeated here.

 

Your lab notebook is your tool to organize your day to day thoughts on your work.  It is also the required documentation to validate your results, your commercial claims, and to leave an exact experimental legacy to your successors that many want to memorialize or extend your work. 

 

Besides being neat, legible and sequential, i.e., the pages should be numbered with none missing ever; your lab notebook must be permanent.  That means you must choose media that will endure the test of time.  That is, the book, the paper in it and the ink you use must last.  Someone reading your notebook 20 years from now should be able to read it just as well as someone two days from now.

 

There are software packages for research notebook keeping.  Using such computer logs has its pluses and minuses.  But going back to the principle of permanence, can you really be sure that the hardware to read and the software to open the files will be available 20 years from now?  If today someone gave you a 5 1/4” floppy from an Apple Lisa, what would you do?  Plus your handwriting, which is more than likely resolvable if not unique, is part of validating the fact that it was you that did the work.

 

How much should you write down in your notebook?  The answer is that you should write down everything that is relevant to the project.  And since you might not know what from today will be relevant tomorrow, write down everything, including the most mundane facts about the lab that day, e.g., the lab temperature, relative humidity, barometric pressure, unusual vibrations felt, power instabilities, etc.  You also should write down everything that you saw, read, were told, that you thought and that you did relevant to your project on a daily basis.  Certainly if you are following a step-wise procedure, log the completion of each step, complete with reagent lot-numbers inasmuch as possible.

 

As your results come in, enter them into your notebook immediately.  You can print out graphs and tables and glue or tape them into your notebook as long as you are sure the glue or tape will be permanent.  Since you probably cannot be 100% sure of that, maybe you should write tables in by hand if you can.  Other key documents can go into your book as well, emails, materials data sheets including their purity analysis.  But it is likely that you will have to create another book to accommodate documentation like that.  Many experimental rigs have some kind of electronic control and data recording system that produces some sort raw data file.  Those files should be printed and bound in some kind of a book.  Such auxiliary books should have an index system, and your main notebook should note references to that index.

 

The notebook is a running document of your thought process on the project.  That means someone reading it should be able to follow not only what you did, but why you did it.  The notebook should therefore contain all your results good, bad or indifferent.  Don’t exclude “bad data” as down the line it might work out to be a new result.  Any mistakes should not be concealed using whiteout, massive erasures, redactions or anything like that.  Rather, just put a single line through the mistake such that the original entry can still be seen; note why you think it is a mistake and keep going. 

 

Importantly you should include calculations, “notes to self” and narratives giving your impressions and interpretations of your data, especially of unexpected results or observations.  A small observation today may save you time or even make for a great discovery in the future.  But be sure to use clear language with your narratives.  Assume that you are writing your notebook for persons that do not have your depth of knowledge on your specific project (which in many if not most cases will be true).  Leaving out key narratives can leave even learned colleagues totally in the dark as to what you did, and it may be impossible to verify your results.

 

Fermat’s Last Theorem provides an illustrative example.  Around 1637, Fermat wrote a note in the margin of his copy of the Arithmetica next to Diophantus’ sum-of-squares problem, “I have discovered a truly marvelous proof that it is impossible to separate a cube into two cubes, or a fourth power into two fourth powers, or in general, any power higher than the second into two like powers. This margin is too narrow to contain it.”

 

There was no more mention of his general proof anywhere else in Fermat’s writings, even over 30 years after he wrote this note.  Nearly 360 years and legions of very smart and well-trained mathematicians went by before someone was able to verify Fermat’s proposition.  It would have been great to have the full narrative of Fermat’s thinking via one of his research notebooks.

 

The key things to remember about your notebook are that it should be permanent, readable, orderly and complete.

 

Typically, the laboratory notebook belongs to the company or institution.  It should stay in the laboratory where the experiments were conducted.  You might be able to make a copy of it with prior permission.  Without prior permission, taking the book or making a copy of it can easily be interpreted as theft.