Thus, further solutions to the lab notebook are a logical and needed step to improve the accuracy, accessibility and ability to reproduce raw scientific results. And you might feel guilty and more than ever part of a huge party named… human beings. And then you may remember that everybody told you that - today more than ever - we must be quite focused to be organized and document everything we did in the lab using precise rules. ![]() Can you easily find the previous data? Are you sure this will be possible using just lab your notebook notes? Can you decipher all notes and drafts? And if something happens with your lab notebook? And why did you forget to write that small detail that has now become critical? In many cases you start to wish you were that kind of person who would take organized notes of everything at the very moment they happen. ![]() Until time starts to pass faster and faster and, maybe in one week or in 3 years, you need to replicate some experiment. In the beginning, keeping the lab notebook is relatively effortless and it even seems simple. The first thing that happens when you join a lab is to receive a book which you should take care as much as your own life, because all your work during graduation and ensuing years will be on those sheets. In addition, the increasing concerns over reproducibility of scientific experiments, as well as data manipulation, have promoted a significant upscaling in the documentation standards required from funding agencies and publications.Ĭan you easily find the previous data?Furthermore, from a practical standpoint, let's put ourselves into the skin of a young student or post-doc. Moreover, as scientists deal with increasing volumes of data, such as in Systems Biology or Big Data, paper notebooks have indeed become inefficient and can be viewed as archaic. And the physical media has its intrinsic fragility. ![]() Moreover, it is always possible to forget documenting crucial information. However, human writing is not always easy to understand/interpret, the paper media is slow to write, its information is tedious to retrieve, it is environmentally unfriendly and very hard to store on a large scale basis for prolonged periods of time. Thus, the lab notebook remains the crucial depository of raw scientific advances. It runs between the naïve and ironic to consider that vast implications ranging from novel worldwide research avenues to drug developments that cost millions - and directly reflect in the lives of many patients and the public in general - are based solely on the good faith that experiments in fact occurred as they are written in a lab notebook. From there, the results are assembled into scientific papers, go to meeting presentations, construct scientific contributions and in some cases serve as the basis for patents and turn into applications. But the essential element in the lab notebook is the data. Science starts and gains life in those pages What is written there is fundamental documentation to provide a safe basis for assessing at any time the collection of observations, accompanied by crucial experimental details, which underlie the rite of passage of a hypothesis to results that are negative or positive, failed or successful, correctly or incorrectly interpreted, etc. Science starts and gains life in those pages. ![]() Paper laboratory notebooks have been at center stage of this scientific communication. Ideas, evidences, experimental findings have to be shared and discussed among students or post-docs themselves and with their supervisors, as well among collaborating groups, funding agencies and in some cases the industry, long before they are externally communicated to the public. Main Article by Percíllia Oliveira and Patricia NolascoĬommunication is at the heart of science throughout all stages of work development.
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