Lab notebook

Electronic

Research is innovative. Instead of following a well marked path, it takes unexpected turns and explorations. It is easy to get lost while doing research, especially when going for months or years. One of the best ways to orient yourself, to remember hypotheses, intermediate steps, and results, is to keep a lab notebook.

• Get in the habit of writing every little step and idea in your lab notebook: it will take initial commitment but will pay well when you need to remember some minor detail for your article or thesis
• Write on computer, not paper. This will make it easy to make quick changes and run fast searches
• Use a Google document or similar cloud solution: it will be with you everywhere you go and will automatically have multiple backups
• Keep it simple! Do not overstress yourself with beautiful writing or rigid multi-layer structure: they will be hard to keep up with, yet won't give any extra benefits

Here is an example of a lab notebook.

Pen and pencil

While many are starting to use electronic notebooks these days (and there is nothing wrong with that), there are still some good reasons to go with good old pen and paper.

• Your lab notebook is definitely an actual lab notebook. In the case of a patent dispute your Google Document will do you no good. There are electronic notebooks that can be used in legal situations now, but they appear to be expensive, proprietary solutions.
• The act of writing with pen and pad is far is slower but more flexible. If you need to quickly sketch out a graph or an idea, it is generally awkward with word processing software (LaTeX, Word, Papers, Google Documents alike).
• The slowness of writing encourages more deliberation.
• It was good enough for the likes of Da Vinci and Darwin.

To put it more succintly, a lab notebook is:

• A legal document
• A daily, and highly detailed record of your thoughts, hypotheses, results, and methods
• Chronological and organized
• A way to completely reconstruct what you did at a particular moment in time

What a lab notebook is not:

• A quick and dirty summary of what you did (e.g. met with Larry and did an experiment)
• Disorganized

For some thoughts on the lab notebook see here.