Electronic Lab Notebook

A lab notebook is used as the record of lab work and data collection as it occurs. Researchers often use lab notebooks to document hypotheses and data analysis. A good lab notebook should allow another scientist to follow the same steps. Electronic lab notebooks are growing in popularity. 

Tel. 713-961-1101, fax 713-961-1149, e-mail sarar ssg.com Electronic lab notebook. PCs (Windows), Macintosh, and UNIX platforms. 

Bruce, S. A Look at the State of Electronic Lab Notebook Technology, Sci. Comp. Instrum. January (2003). Retreived online from www.scimag.com. 

Formal initiation of a failure investigation should be based on a well-controlled process defined by SOP or company guidelines. This requires documentation using worksheets or forms to be completed manually or electronically using LIMS or electronic lab notebooks. These forms should contain a section for description of the occurred failure and a preliminary action plan. 

The values calculated by Excel are shown in cells B12 and B13. Of course they must be rounded off to the correct number of significant figures, but are the same as the results obtained manually. Learning to use spreadsheets can save time and permit the data to be stored, processed, and presented in a variety of formats. The spreadsheets can be made part of the electronic lab notebooks that are common in industry and government laboratories as well as in many college laboratories. 

With Empower and its parent product Millennium, Waters is the pioneer for database-supported CDS. With the current version Empowers, the final stage of advancements is supposed to be reached. Currently, Waters is developing a successor called UNIEI that follows a new conception and a redevelopment from the scratch the combination of CDS, Electronic Lab Notebook (ELN), and Scientific Data Management System (SDMS). 

DMS, and ELN Electronic Lab Notebook. These solutions must be operated in a validated environment, resulting in a very high burden during the design and implementation phases. In addition, a number of different electronic manufacturer-specific data formats are created, besides paper documents. 

In addition, a reality of the pharmaceutical industry at present is the outsourcing of some of all of the synthetic chemistry for a project. To the list of existing questions must be added several others. Which contract research organization(s) will you choose, and what can they be expected to accomplish How will you handle electronic lab notebooks, documenting intellectual property issues and other legal issues How do you handle the logistics of quality assurance, shipping, and customs To help you address each of these, it is prudent to reach out into your broader network to get opinions from others not only in your company but also across the industry. 

Daily wet lab progress is to be documented in the notebook pages. This may contain detailed information and act as an electronic lab notebook, or it may be diary-like summaries of... 

Safety requires you to think in advance about what you will do never do anything that seems dangerous. Know how to use safety equipment such as goggles, fume hood, lab coat, gloves, emergency shower, eyewash, and fire extinguisher. Chemicals should be stored and used in a manner that minimizes contact of solids, liquids, and vapors with people. Environmentally acceptable disposal procedures should be established in advance for every chemical that you use. Your lab notebook tells what you did and what you observed it should be understandable to other people. It also should allow you to repeat an experiment in the same manner in the future. You should understand the principles of operation of electronic and mechanical balances and treat them as delicate equipment. Buoyancy corrections are required in accurate work. Burets should be read in a reproducible manner and drained slowly for best results. Always interpolate between markings to obtain accuracy one deci-... 

The unique moment of discovery came in April 1982 when Dan Shechtman was doing some electron diffraction experiments on alloys, produced by very rapid cooling of molten metals. In the experiments with molten aluminum with added magnesium, cooled rapidly, he observed an electron diffraction pattern with tenfold symmetry (see, the pattern in the Introduction). It was as great a surprise as it could have been imagined for any well-trained crystallographer. Shechtman s surprise was recorded with three question marks in his lab notebook, 10-fold [140],... 

The validation documentation typically consists of a protocol, analytical data, and a final report. One approach to simplifying validation documentation is to focus on a thorough protocol with preapproved acceptance criteria, which are necessary to determine whether the validation results demonstrate that the method is fit for purpose. In early development, this protocol may be captured in a lab notebook which could be in either a paper or an electronic environment. There is an ever increasing trend in the use of electronic laboratory notebooks which makes it simple to execute previously developed protocols. Later in development, the protocol should be a unique document, which may have data tables to enter the test results, requiring only a short executive summary to summarize the results and a reference or attachment of raw data. A development lab will often use these well-developed and optimized master method validation protocols" " as templates for subsequent validations. A copy of the method procedure and, where available, a method development report may be appended to the validation protocol. In general, the validation protocol should contain the following ... 

Rule 4 tells you to show your work. The information to record includes who did the processing, when it was performed, what software brand and version number was used, what algorithm and parameters were used, and why the manipulation was performed. This data can be written on a hard copy of the spectrum, recorded in a lab notebook, or saved in electronic form. Some software packages record some or all of this information for you automatically. What matters is that this information be recorded because processing a spectrum can alter its appearance, and anyone who looks at a spectrum needs to know what was done so they can take it into account when interpreting the spectrum. Also, publishing a processed spectrum without stating how and why it was processed is a form of scientific fraud—a behavior best avoided if you value your career. 

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