
Guidelines for keeping a laboratory notebook - Tomte
http://www.ruf.rice.edu/~bioslabs/tools/notebook/notebook.html
======
analog31
My paper notebooks were always horrific. Writing has always been painful and
awkward for me. But I could type like nobody's business thanks to programming.
I survived college in the early 80s by being one of the first students to get
a word processor.

By the time I was keeping a notebook, my work was generating mountains of
computer readable data, source code, and so forth. We managed by agreeing on a
format for data files, where the filename referenced a notebook page, and it
worked OK.

Today, it's unavoidable that people are going to keep their notes
electronically, and there are no perfect solutions for doing this. Wet
chemists still like paper notebooks, since it's hard to get a computer close
to the bench, and to type while wearing rubber gloves. Academic workers are
expected to supply their own computers, and are nervous about getting them
damaged or contaminated. Plus, drawing pictures and writing equations on a
computer are both awkward.

Computation related fields lend themselves well to purely electronic
notebooks, no surprise. Today, a lot of my work fits perfectly in a Jupyter
notebook.

Commercial notebook software exists, but it tends to be sold largely for
enterprise use, i.e., the solution it solves is how to control lab workers and
secure their results, not how to enable independent, creative work.

~~~
bkanber
Professional lab researchers use physical notebooks because they are lo-tech
and immutable. A pre-numbered page in a bound book can't be torn out
surreptitiously. Pencil and white-out are disallowed. They're simple and
tamper-evident, which is very important if you're designing pharmaceuticals,
for instance.

Obviously there's crypto, signing, checksums, and so on, that you can use on
computers. But when the answer is as simple as writing in pen in a pre-
numbered, bound notebook, and having your supervisor sign your notes, might as
well just do that.

~~~
analog31
Definitely good points. And every field has its own level of security risk. In
my case, the greatest risk is me not being able to figure out what I did in
the past. I'm not in a tightly regulated / audited industry.

~~~
praptak
It is not only regulation. There might be a legal fight over a discovery and
for this there's nothing like a tamper-evident paper document to prove that a
lab did X on date Y.

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gpm
This strikes me as a very weird document, it contains some good advice about
keeping a detailed and accurate record. It links to a cool story about why
this is important
([http://www.ruf.rice.edu/~bioslabs/tools/notebook/ringerstory...](http://www.ruf.rice.edu/~bioslabs/tools/notebook/ringerstory.html)).

Then separately it has the whole thing that reads like it's about a protocol
to prove you aren't committing fraud. Except it's hard to imagine
circumstances outside of undergraduate classes where anyone is going to read
your notebook trying to convict you of committing fraud. It's also hard to see
how this advice helps because it just makes fraud slightly harder, now instead
of editing in place you have to edit by copying things over to a new notebook.

~~~
scottlocklin
I was at LBNL while the element 118 crisis happened. While ultimately it was
figured out using VMS timestamps, well kept lab notebooks helped clear a lot
of people from potential guilt.

Considering how bad the replication crisis is, if our society ever gets its
shit together, many of these people should actually be convicted of fraud or
at least removed from positions where they could commit further frauds.

~~~
EvanAnderson
Is there any good material to read about the forensics that went into the
events surrounding the element 118 fraud? It sounds interesting.

~~~
scottlocklin
Possible, but I doubt it would tell the actual story. I knew two of the
coauthors in the Ninov paper (one of my closest friends) and two of the guys
who did the computer forensics as it turned out, so I kind of had an inside
view.

Anyway, use a paper notebook. It's worth the trouble for lots of reasons. Also
use analog chart recorders if you can.

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ajot
I've found this [1] other tutorial as a great basis to keep a good lab
notebook.I love how he tried a cromatography of different pens to find
something that can survive any accident.

[1] [https://colinpurrington.com/tips/lab-
notebooks](https://colinpurrington.com/tips/lab-notebooks)

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qrbLPHiKpiux
No mention on pen or pencil.

People tend to hate pencils. I love them.

They're more permanent and chemically stable than ink - unless, or course -
the eraser monster hides around your book.

~~~
lwhsiao
> Please use a ball point pen for all entries, so that the marks will not
> smear nor will they be erasable.

They just give this. But, there is a lot of interesting discussion about
different inks vs pencil for archiving things that I would've loved to read.

~~~
rolph
Something i was told was to use the lefthand page for rough work, it
[leftpage] was to be considered an appendix or attachment of sort and was not
considered for scrutiny. it was highly advisable to use pencil on the left
page in wet solvent conditions [water, alchohol, benzene etc.]

The right hand side of the note book was a final and standing statement of
your notes and was to be indelible ink with bracket and single cross through
in the case of transcription errors. the right hand page was the "final
answer"

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crshults
I've been using the big grid+ offering from Vela Sciences for my daily work.
Only use pencil though, Graph Gear 1000. Recently switched from 0.5mm to
0.9mm. Have only been keeping "good" notes for a few years now and so far
pencil hasn't been a problem. Was just rereading Jan 2017 this morning and
even in 0.5mm, looks as good as new. I'm not in a real lab setting though so I
just go with what feels good. If I was forced to use ink, I probably wouldn't
take as many notes.

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Bucephalus355
The classic book on this topic:

Notebooks of the Mind: Explorations of Thinking
[https://www.amazon.com/dp/0195108965](https://www.amazon.com/dp/0195108965)

