Keeping a Lab Notebook

There are alot of very good reasons for keeping an accurate and well organized lab notebook. These extend from such simple considerations as being able to reproduce a desirable (or avoid an undesirable) result, to protecting you or your company from losing intellectual property. In several instances, a properly signed and dated lab notebook has saved a company from paying royalties to another company which patented a process that the first company had already developed. One of the hardest aspects of keeping a labnote can be coming up with a good organizational scheme that will work for you, and then being diligent about making entries into your book. We find that many of our graduate students, while they have had several courses where they needed to keep lab notebooks, do not really know how to use one in their research. Our hope is that this course, with its emphasis on developing processes and reporting results, will help hone this skill.

The central objective of any lab notebook is to record the proper information to allow you, or someone else, to reproduce your results. What do we look for in a good lab notebook?

• A page number on each page, and a date at the beginning of each day's entry.
• A table of contents at the beginning of the notebook. You can leave blank pages so you have sufficient room. It can be updated weekly, and provides a place to start looking if you have to come back to the notebook a year later to find out what speed to spin Shipley 1800 series photoresist to get a 1 micron film.
• A consistent, workable numbering scheme for samples, data files etc.
• Ideas on possible procedures to be followed or designs of tools or processes.
• Sketches of key experimental setups.
• Actual procedures followed - times, temperatures, powers, surface treatments etc.
• Data - this can be recorded numbers, or cross references to computer data files with a description of the file contents.
• Sketches and plots - A sketch of a curve on an oscilloscope screen or a plot of data taken with axes labelled. Reduced photocopies of computer plots can be pasted into the notebook to keep a running record of a particular sample's properties. Making a rough plot of data as you take it is an important way to quickly determine if any points are out of bounds, or if you have missed an important region of paramater space.
• Comments, observations, conclusions, and hypothesis for future experiments.
• A legible notebook that is kept up to date daily.
• A witness' signature if you come up with a good idea.

The lab book should be a tool and not a burden. It's something to help you out a bit futher down the road when you ask yourself, "now how did I make this sample?" It's not possible to list all the properties of a good labnotebook on a page like this, especially since each notebook will be tailored to its owner. We can give you a few more links to other websites on lab notebooks.

Keeping a Lab Notebook From Havery Mudd College
How to develop a laboratory Notebook From Davidson College
Guidelines for keeping a laboratory Record - includes examples - From Rice University
The Laboratory Notebook From Univ. of Oregon

This page last updated January 10, 2006