How To Set Up A Lab Notebook

Dwelling house

Laboratory
Studies

Recordkeeping, Writing,
& Information Analysis

Laboratory
Methods

guidelines for recordkeeping
examples of notebook entries
importance of practiced recordkeeping

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Guidelines for Keeping a Laboratory Record

If you have congenital a perfect demonstration practice non remove all traces of the scaffolding by which you accept raised it.
Clark Maxwell

The post-obit is a general description of how to keep a proper laboratory notebook. Requirements for different teaching, research, clinical, or industrial labs will virtually likely vary. Some institutions/labs will crave less stringent record keeping, others will hold you to a very strict protocol. A well kept notebook provides a reliable reference for writing up materials and methods and results for a written report. Information technology is a legally valid record that preserves your rights or those of an employer or academic investigator to your discoveries. A comprehensive notebook permits one to reproduce any office of a methodology completely and accurately.

Outline of procedures

Choosing a notebook
Preparing the notebook
What to enter
Making entries
The summary
Organization
- Doing two things at once?
- Continuation pages
- Are things getting besides sloppy?
- Repeated procedures
Loose materials
Table of Contents
Checklist

Examples

Examples of notebook pages and entries
Importance of keeping accurate notes

Choosing a notebook

For about purposes y'all may select a bound notebook, quadrille-ruled. A educational activity lab may require tear-out duplicate pages for making carbon copies. An applied science or industrial research/development lab will likely require a specific type notebook with prenumbered pages and places for date and investigator'south and supervisor's signatures on each page. Pads of tear-out graph paper or screw leap notebooks without pre-numbered pages are not acceptable. It must be impossible to tear out a folio without leaving evidence. It is safest to select something that is clearly labeled as a laboratory notebook.

Preparing the Notebook

Please apply a brawl point pen for all entries, then that the marks will not smear nor will they be erasable.

Put your proper noun, a telephone number and/or address, and project proper name or grade number on the outside front cover of the record. Put that same information on the beginning page inside, or on the within front encompass. If your notebook does not include a prelabeled tabular array of contents section, then reserve the adjacent several pages for a table of contents by labeling the superlative of each folio as Table of Contents and numbering each folio. If your notebook does non have prenumbered pages, you may wish to use lower case Roman numerals, as in a standard publication. Side by side, number the next several pages with Arabic numerals in sequence, and you are prepare to begin recording information.

What to enter

Higher up all, it is critical that you lot enter all procedures and data straight into your notebook in a timely manner, that is, while you are conducting the bodily work. Your entries must be sufficiently detailed then that you or someone else could conduct whatever procedure with only the notebook equally a guide. Few students (and not that many researchers for that matter) tape sufficiently detailed and organized information. The nigh logical system of notebook entries is chronological. If a proper chronological record is kept and co-signed by a coworker or supervisior, it is a legally valid record. Such a record is necessary if you lot or your employer are to proceed your rights to your discoveries.

Depending on requirements set past a teacher, superivsor, company, or whatever, yous may not accept to confine your notebook entries to lab notes just. On the other hand a student might tape your class lecture notes, lab lecture notes, ideas, questions, library research notes, and notes that are office of any pre-lab preparation. The bare minimum entries for an academic lab class, for each lab study, should include title of the lab report; introduction and objectives; detailed procedures and information (recorded in the lab itself); summary.

We usually record a lot more than information in a laboratory notebook than we would report in a research newspaper. For example, in a published commodity we don't report centrifuge type, rpm, rotor type, or which motorcar was used. Withal, if a process is unsuccessful you may want to check to see that you lot used the correct rpm or correct rotor. Possibly the centrifuge itself was miscalibrated. You would need to know which auto you used. In a research paper one does not written report which person performed which tasks, considering such data is useless to a third party. Even so in the notebook information technology is important to note who was responsible for what procedure. Again, y'all may need such information to troubleshoot your experiments.

Making entries

Someone else may need to consult your notebook old, so please make your entries articulate and legible.

When you make your showtime entries of the twenty-four hour period, get-go by entering the appointment, writing out the calendar month or abbreviation for the calendar month (e.1000., five April '04, or April v, 2004, merely not iv/5/04). The employ of numerals only can cause defoliation. For example, in Europe the day comes before the month. Thus April 5, 2004 would be written as 5/4/04. When you start each new folio of a notebook enter the date next to the page number. Each page should be numbered and dated consistently. Almost of united states of america employ the upper right corner of each page for appointment and page number.

Depending on how your notebook is designed you may choose whether or non to utilize the backs of pages. If you leave them bare, put a corner-to-corner line through them to void all blank spaces. Some people use the backs for crude calculations, then void remaining blank space. Y'all might besides make up one's mind to save space (and trees) and apply both sides of each page. Obviously you cannot employ both sides with notebooks that are designed to make duplicate copies. In situations where you turn in duplicate copies to a supervisor, you lot apparently must start each new gear up of entries on a new page.

Write a title for each and every new set of entries. Distinct sets of entries should be separated past using informative headings and by leaving a unmarried infinite or two betwixt private sets of entries. Specific information can be more than readily located that mode. For a new laboratory study, write down a very cursory introduction to the study, and list the objectives. If y'all take a specific hypothesis, write information technology down. The object is to make information technology completely clear what you intend to practice.

Record everything yous do in the lab, fifty-fifty if you are post-obit a published procedure. For example, if you started by obtaining a quantity of tissue from an teacher, and so write downwardly that you obtained tissue, depict it, annotation how much, what status, etc. How much you lot write down is up to you lot, but any relevant data should be at that place. For instance, information technology doesn't thing much if y'all received a clamper of liver in a red ice bucket or a blackness one. However, it does affair that the fabric was on water ice. If you change a protocol in any way or decide between alternative methods, and so the correct information must be recorded in the notebook. For example, a protocol for tissue fractionation may recommend centrifugation at 9400 x yard, but nosotros may decide to use 12,000 x chiliad in the lab. The correct g force must be noted.

If you lot brand a error, put a line through the fault and write the new information side by side to information technology. Never erase or obliterate an entry. When you finish a page, put a corner-to corner line through any blank parts that could still be used for data entry. Every fleck of every folio must be legible and filled, either with data or with a marking that voids the section (come across examples).

The summary

When you take finished a project, summarize what you have accomplished. You lot don't have to describe conclusions, but point what sort of data or observations y'all nerveless, samples you saved (and where and how you saved them), or whatever other relevant information that wraps upward the report. For a continuing study keep the summary extremely brief. In fact, if the notes are well organized and it is obvious where the study left off, yous need write aught more than "To be connected..." Summaries help maintain continuity. They indicate where the work left off and how it might resume.

Organisation

Doing two things at one time?

What if you lot are conducting two long procedures at in one case, each with long waiting periods? For example, suppose y'all are conducting a protein analysis and preparing a gel for your samples out in the laboratory. Back in the cell civilisation room, you are harvesting and processing tissues for master culture. Both procedures involve waiting periods, yet you lot will complete both tasks past the cease of the day.

Simply use your best judgment. You could divide each page into columns and keep your two records side-by-side. You might date 2 consecutive pages, keeping both records separately. In either case, when yous leave the laboratory for the day cross out any unused parts of a page that precede the last entry.

Continuation pages

What if you need more than one folio for a projection? With continuing research, that will e'er be the case. Proper utilize of continuation notes makes it possible to follow your path through a long experiment or series of experiments without having to leaf through every page of your notebook.

For case, let's say yous labeled some protein samples with the radioisotope Southward-35, ran a gel, and placed the gel in a motion picture cassette in guild to produce an autoradiograph. During the 2 days your moving picture is in the freezer, yous devote all of your fourth dimension to a cloning project that is office of an unrelated study. After you put your film cassette in the freezer, simply write Continued, folio ___, then enter the date and championship of your other project, and keep to tape information.

When y'all resume work on the protein samples, enter the date, write Continued from page ___, and enter your autoradiography results. This manner, everything you do in the laboratory is recorded chronologically, still someone interested in following your progress could start from the get-go and follow every procedure on just that one study, from start to finish.

Are things getting too sloppy?

Mayhap your data records are scattered throughout the notebook, and you would similar to summarize them. Become ahead. You may re-enter tables or figures whatever fourth dimension you wish to organize your piece of work a bit ameliorate. To preclude confusion over duplication of data you may put a line through a table or effigy you intend to re-draw, initial and date the change, and note the page on which the re-organized data can be establish. Just don't obscure whatever of the original entry.

Repeated procedures

And so far you accept been advised to record each step you perform in the laboratory, regardless of whether the procedure is published somewhere. Nevertheless, one time you comport out a procedure, you lot can refer to that part of your notebook, and only note changes you make. For example, the offset time you prepare a sequencing gel you should write downwardly the verbal formulation, how you mix the gel, how long you let it cure, etc. The next time, just refer to the name of the procedure and the appropriate page(south) of your notebook.

Loose materials

Suppose you lot enter raw data into a figurer and have a printout with 400 pieces of data. Or, suppose you generate a graph using a software program. You lot might even have a argent-stained gel that you lot wish to refer to frequently, or a fluoroescence photomicrograph that sums upwardly your results nicely. Some investigators adopt to attach such materials to the notebook itself, but as well many such items make a sloppy notebook and can stress the binding. Loose data should be kept in a split up binder or notebook, with location noted in the book.

Record all entries in the table of contents every bit you get along. You can organize it anyway yous like but it is advisable to include multiple levels in a table of contents, that is, indicate where a new study starts and include subheadings for specific parts of a study, methods, sets of information, etc. The idea is to enable someone (such a supervisor, grader, or yourself a year from now) to notice anything rapidly. Listing each set of entries with dates and folio numbers. If you are seriously anal-retentive, you might record every experiment in chronological lodge, then use the remaining blank space to cross reference the contents experiment past experiment.

For a teaching lab you might listing each and every set of entries fabricated in your notebook, in chronological order, including complete and informative titles. Examples of sets of entries include an introduction, a summary, a fix of procedures for a specific preparation, a complete data set up, calculations for diluting samples or preparing assay standards, etc. A grader should be able to discover whatever specific entry quickly, without flipping through pages.

Notebook Checklist

Equally y'all tape your activities in the laboratory, ask yourself, "Did I..."

Keep upward with the table of contents?
Engagement each page?
Number each folio consecutively?
Utilise continuation notes when necessary?
Properly void all blank pages or portions of pages (front and back)?
Enter all information directly into the notebook?
Properly introduce and summarize each experiment?
Include complete details of all first-fourth dimension procedures?
Include calculations?

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Created by David R. Caprette (caprette@rice.edu), Rice Academy Dates