The Lab Notebook

In parallel with this chronological directory structure, I find it useful to maintain a chronologically organized lab notebook. This is a document that resides in the root of the results directory and that records your progress in detail. Entries in the notebook should be dated, and they should be relatively verbose, with links or embedded images or tables displaying the results of the experiments that you performed. In addition to describing precisely what you did, the notebook should record your observations, conclusions, and ideas for future work. Particularly when an experiment turns out badly, it is tempting simply to link the final plot or table of results and start a new experiment. Before doing that, it is important to document how you know the experiment failed, since the interpretation of your results may not be obvious to someone else reading your lab notebook.

In addition to the primary text describing your experiments, it is often valuable to transcribe notes from conversations as well as e-mail text into the lab notebook. These types of entries provide a complete picture of the development of the project over time.

In practice, I ask members of my research group to put their lab notebooks online, behind password protection if necessary. When I meet with a member of my lab or a project team, we can refer to the online lab notebook, focusing on the current entry but scrolling up to previous entries as necessary. The URL can also be provided to remote collaborators to give them status updates on the project.

Note that if you would rather not create your own “home-brew” electronic notebook, several alternatives are available. For example, a variety of commercial software systems have been created to help scientists create and maintain electronic lab notebooks. Furthermore, especially in the context of collaborations, storing the lab notebook on a wiki-based system or on a blog site may be appealing.